Prompt
Describe or narrate a scenario about an advertisement found a generation into a future in which “progress” has continued. Your description should address issues related to communication and elicit feelings of amusement.
Ad
Ad transcript:
Wanting to reach a bigger audience with your ads? Looking for an ad space where viewers literally can’t look away? Get your ads on Googgle™ now! In case you’ve been living under a rock, Googgle is the new smart goggles from Google. Googgle used to have a free model that attracted almost 38 million Canadians to use its various features such as providing real-life captioning/translations, recording first-person Snap-Tok videos, and virtual reality gaming, all without interruption. As we transition to a subscription model where free users will be subjected to ad breaks (temporary disabled if we detect the user is driving), and with users signing away their privacy rights with our 328-page EULA, this is your chance to reach users with our precise targeted ads! Want to become the next major car company such as Honda and Toyota? Anytime a user spends 3 seconds looking at car dealership or if our microphones pick up key phrases such as “new car” we’ll bombard them with ads for your vehicles! Your company specializes in groceries? Anytime our GPS detects that a user is at a supermarket and hears key phrases such as “what’s for dinner” or “I’m hungry,” we’ll hit them with ads for your products! Better yet, using our machine learning algorithms, we detect what kind of circumstances make users most susceptible to your ads and begin focusing your ads on everyone in those circumstances! Interested? Contact Google today to inquire about ads on the Googgle!
Reflection
My ideas for this prompt were first inspired by seeing a digital billboard displaying “your ad here,” leading me to think about an ad for advertisers. Thinking about the future, my mind immediately went to dystopian futures where people have retina implants that plays ads, but because this tech would be more than a generation away, I went with the lower-tech alternative, “smart glasses.”
Although Google Glass has already been developed for a decade and was considered a failure (Gvora 2023), technology associated with smart glasses are still being developed. For instance, as an evolution for the voice-to-text technology discussed in module three, Google was working on augmented reality (AR) for smart glasses that provide “subtitles for real life” that could be translated in real time to break down language barriers (Google 2022).
I imagined a world where smart glasses made a comeback in the near future alongside advancements in augmented reality and virtual reality technology, and applied Google’s current practices with Youtube. While Youtube was originally ad-free, Google eventually monetized it and came up with a subscription model, Youtube Premium, where paid users do not receive ads while free users are bombarded with targeted ads. I imagined the Googgle, a pun on Google and Goggle, would use a similar trajectory in which it was initially released ad-free to get millions of users on board, and then switching to an ad model to increase revenue. The targeted ads and correlation of circumstances with ad susceptibility is inspired by module 10, where sources such as Tufekci (2017) discuss how companies use machine learning algorithms for ads.
References
Google. (2022, May 11). Breaking down language barriers with augmented reality | Google [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj0bFX9HXeE
Gvora, J. (2023, April 30). Google Glass: What Happened To The Futuristic Smart Glasses? Screen Rant. https://screenrant.com/google-glass-smart-glasses-what-happened-explained/
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. [Video]. TED.