Personalized Digital Advertising: How Data and Technology Are Transforming How We Market

1. The Talking Billboard

In the 2002 movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise walks into a mall and is greeted by “live” billboards that address him by name and show him outfits he will likely be interested in. The billboards do it by scanning his retina. (Turns out it’s someone else’s retina, but you’ll have to watch the movie to know why.)

In many ways, as advertising has gone from traditional media to new media, it has not changed very much. When I was growing up, my first exposure to advertising was posters on walls everywhere I went and a few large billboards advertising everything from toothpaste to cars. The idea of marketing via posters was simple: Buy enough of them at the lowest possible price per poster and get them out in as many places ...