Xbox Adds Interactive In-Game, In-Video Advertising

From The Online Reporter   

 

Microsoft Xbox users with a Kinect will soon be able to use motion and voice commands to interact directly with advertisements that appear while they are playing their favorite games or watching videos on the service.
 

Microsoft has announced a new advertising tool called NUads (natural user-interface ads) that lets users interact with advertising on the console dashboard, embedded into video games and other video content on the platform. The ads use the voice and motion control developed for the Kinect add-on that was released at the end of 2010.

“When you have highly interactive people and a passive medium, they are interacting with their phone or their laptop while watching TV,” Mark Kroese, general manager advertising at Microsoft, told the New York Times. Kroese told the paper that the ads aim to “create a natural way for the user to engage with the TV.”

“The new ad units really epitomized the level of engagement that everyone is working towards,” John M. Lisko, the executive communications director of Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles, told the paper. 

Among the new features are direct integration of texting, tweeting and answering questions, polls or even voting. Commands are pretty direct with things like the user telling the machine “Xbox Tweet” to share a scripted Twitter message via an attached account. If a user comes across an advertisement that features extended content they wish to view, the gamer just needs to say “Xbox More” and they will be directed to the content or it will be e-mailed to them, depending on the content, campaign and user preferences. 

Perhaps the biggest feature will come into play as the Xbox shows commercials for TV shows and films. Users can say “Xbox Near Me” to find retailers and movie theaters for the content they’re being shown. If the user says “Xbox Schedule” for a TV show that’s being advertised, they will receive a text message to remind them when the show is about to come on. 

The goal for Microsoft is very similar to what Yahoo has proposed with its Broadcaster Interactive technology: make the new features simple and intuitive enough that users will natively engage with them and so they can be overlayed upon existing commercials. Perhaps the best news of all for advertisers is that there’s no need to touch any commercial, just determine a point in a commercial for a prompt and set that up through the Xbox platform instead of through the ad itself.

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