This week at the Cannes International Advertising Festival Microsoft unveiled Nuads, or natural user-interface ads - a platform that transforms TV ads into interactive ad via the voice-and-control-gestures in Kinect for Xbox 360.
The technology, demoed at the conference, and blogged about later, by Mark Kroese, General Manager of Microsoft’s Advertising Business Group, finally makes real a vision of interactive television ads that Microsoft spoke about at last year's show, as the Financial Times pointed out. Fundamental to the concept, Kroese explained, is that people already interact with their televisions by waving and gesturing at content they like or don't like. Previous attempts also failed to take into account the couch potato in most TV viewers. "At the end of the day, people want to interact with content with a bowl of popcorn - not a clunky keyboard or remote - in their lap," he said.
Five Formats
There are five NUads formats, but more are likely. The ones demoed by Kroese could be placed across the Xbox:
Social advocacy. A simple voice command such as "Xbox Tweet" gives the consumer the ability to share something about a brand with their friends.
Request for information (RFI). Say "Xbox More," and the viewer can request additional information and/or a discount coupon to be sent directly to the email inbox.
Near me. Say "Xbox Near Me" to locate a retailer close by, and receive a text message with the location.
Schedule an event. "Xbox Schedule" sends a calendar reminder about an upcoming show.
Vote for your favorite. By waving a hand, audiences can convey preferences for prompted questions, such as who is your favorite villain in the Green Lantern movie trailer.
One Ad Company On Board
Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles, part of the Publicis Groupe has advertised on the Xbox console and is "absolutely considering" the new capabilities, according to John M. Lisko, the executive communications director. (via the New York Times). "You can text, you can tweet, you can vote," he said. "That's phenomenal."
Early Adopters Win This Time
Indeed, NUads seem to borrow from the best of all worlds. They don't, as eMarketer’s Paul Verna told the Times, face the same challenges that in-game advertisers did a few years ago.
They also are - much like the first iAds were - bound to make a deep impression on viewers, perhaps even more significantly than in-app ads did when they first debuted. That would take some doing, of course, as even a few years out of the gate, consumers still are finding in-app ads more impressionable than mobile ads found via their mobile browser, Kantar Media's Compete just reported. For these reasons - and the fact that the industry is moving steadily towards voice-based and gesture-based interfaces - marketers should prepare for this channel as well.
As Kroese pointed out in an earlier blog, "marketers could literally begin engaging audiences in a conversation with content. With Kinect technology, the time has come for marketers to stop measuring campaign success by counting eyeballs, and instead count conversations between the consumer and the interactive ad."
