Interactive Ads Coming to Kinect in Games and Videos

Soon you will be able to say, "Xbox More," and your Kinect-equipped Xbox 360 will drop you out of that heated battle you were having with friends and open an information panel about an advertisement you just saw. Somehow, they believe this will be a value ad for gamers.

Great, just what we need in life is more advertising. Advertising in the game space certainly hasn’t done anything to keep the price of games down, nor has it done much to boost the quality of games and yet, it continues to infiltrate every nook and cranny of gaming whether you realize it or not.

Now Microsoft has announced NUads which will be Kinect interactive advertisements on the platform.

Yaaaa.... (sarcasm)

Does this mean we can expect even more ads in the Xbox dashboard? Somehow, Microsoft seems to think that we want to interact with advertising through voice and motion commands. The only way I would want to do that was if I could say "shoo" and it went away or swat it with my hand to destroy it. Oh, did I mention that these ads will be in-game or in-video? No? Well that’s their plan apparently.

Now only will these ads infiltrate the dashboard, but they will be in-game and in-stream (during a video). The NUads are meant to keep our attention, I think what they’ll really do is force us to turn off our Kinect while doing certain things in hopes that the ads won’t show up.

The thing that really makes me laugh is that they are building social networking into the ads as well as Kinect. Xbox Tweet and Xbox More are spoken commands that will open a Twitter interface or take you to a page with more information about a product. Who believes they are really going to be interested in that in the middle of game or video? Are you going to drop out of a multiplayer session in Gears of War 3 to read about the newest Coke product? Doubtful. How about pausing a film to go find more information about the new Hyundai? Most likely not.

Apparently, they have completely forgotten that we find advertising intrusive and forcing it upon us just makes us find ways around it.

The NUads will also have commands like Xbox Schedule for a TV show schedule, Xbox Near Me, for a location-based search of retailers who have the product nearby and Xbox Big Brother, which will call the Thought Police and send them bursting into your home in order to haul away your deviant family members...

OK, I stole that last one from Orwell, but it certainly seems like there could be some massive privacy issues, like what kind of tracking are they going to be doing? Will they track everything you do now on your Kinect so that they can get a behavioral pattern and start sending you ads they believe are more relevant? Will you suddenly start receiving junk mail from a local Pizza Hut because you voted on which topping is better via your NUads and they’ve got your credit card billing address from Xbox?

No, this does not sound good for Xbox-based gamers one bit. Plus, as we have seen numerous times in the games industry, if this pans out for Microsoft, you can bet it will end up on the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

Just what we need, an ad for a local gun shop during a frantic battle in SOCOM or Killzone 3...