Our Cell Phones, Ourselves

Imagine, for a moment, a lazy Sunday afternoon at the mall. It’s 3 p.m., maybe 4. You’re with your husband, your wife, your partner, your mother. You’re feeling weighed down by a regrettably large lunch at the Cheesecake Factory or California Pizza Kitchen. On a whim you enter the Gap, and as you do, you hear the chime of an arriving text message. The message is not from your friend, or lover, or son. It reads:

Good afternoon, Mrs. White, and welcome to the Gap! Did you enjoy your recent purchase of comfort-fit tank tops? Please take a look at our summer collection—and while you’re at it, help yourself to 20 percent off! Have a great day!

If this sounds like an irritating but (thankfully) futuristic vision, that’s because it is: The scene I’ve just described was mostly cribbed from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, which is set in Washington, DC, in 2054. (In the movie version, retinal scanners identify the customer, and the sales pitch is spoken by holographic avatars of cheery salespeople.) But the day when we find ourselves confronted by the so-called intuitive advertising depicted in the film may not be far off. Upstart companies like Watertown-based M-Qube are already making disconcerting progress in that direction. In one of the firms’ many projects, shoppers at the CambridgeSide Galleria were recruited as subjects in a seemingly mundane marketing experiment: They would contact a designated number, and in return they’d receive coupons at a store of their choice. The wrinkle was that the coupons were text messaged straight to their cell phones.

The concept is called mobile marketing: Interactive text, video, and voice-based advertising zapped straight to your Nokia. In one basic form, mobile marketing operates through your cell phone’s web browser: When you visit certain sites, you’re greeted by tiny banner ads urging you to buy—well, everything. In another, users opt into programs that give them access to cell-based content in exchange for viewing carefully calibrated special offers. Along with its CambridgeSide project, M-Qube has developed mobile-marketing initiatives involving text-message trivia games and interactive photo swapping for clients including Pontiac and Nextel. Third Screen Media, another Boston firm, has developed mobile-marketing applications for the likes of USA Today and the Weather Channel.

These efforts are just the beginning: A recent survey concluded that nearly 9 out of 10 major brands will use text and multimedia messaging to reach their audience within the next two years. Another study has forecast that mobile ad spending will grow from $45 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion by 2009. (M-Qube, by the way, was recently acquired for $250 million by VeriSign, and Microsoft is rumored to be in the process of buying Third Screen Media.)

Advertising on your cell phone: It’s an obvious evolution, but one that will surely be greeted by 99.7 percent of the population with a groan of despair. What’s most interesting, though, is what will follow the groan: A shrug, as though mobile marketing is pedestrian, and not the utterly remarkable phenomenon that it is.

THESE ARE DIFFICULT DAYS for the advertising industry. Between TiVo’s creation of commercial-optional television and the downward spiral of newspaper circulation figures, advertisers are desperate for new ways to get their messages across. The fundamental limitation of traditional ad media—radio, television, print—is that they require consumers to come to them, either by flipping on a radio or TV, or opening their daily Globe. The killer app of mobile marketing is that it allows advertisers to go straight to consumers, by beaming targeted multimedia sales pitches directly to a PowerBar-sized device in a person’s palm, nearly anywhere in the world.

This is depressingly impressive. Yet it is not surprising, since all modern communication technologies are inevitably co-opted as marketing tools. It’s the zero-sum game of contemporary communication: For every letter there exists a piece of junk mail, for every e-mail a pound of spam.

So why the hope it might be different with cell phones? Write it off, perhaps, to human nature. When confronted with any new technology, many of us become gleefully naive: We trust that the device is infallible, capable of performing its particular function in a secure, reliable, and nuisance-free manner. We’re in a honeymoon phase, too smitten to peer into the murky shadows of doubt. (See, for example, the Internet before viruses, television before Ronco infomercials.) And the groundbreaking personal-communication advances of the digital era—e-mail, text and instant messaging—particularly invite this smittenness. Think back to the days, not so long ago, when the arrival of an e-mail message sent a quick electric thrill racing up the spine: It was a message to you, the modern equivalent of a handwritten letter, or a telegram, or a smoke signal in the cloudless sky.

My own entrée to the cellular world came only recently: Though I work as a robotics researcher at the mecca of modern technology, MIT, I didn’t buy my first cell phone until last winter, when the birth of my daughter mandated a new level of reach-ability. And my own brief honeymoon phase was, I’m embarrassed to admit, gleeful to the point of euphoria. My wife was forced to listen, more than once, as I explained that this is a wonderful moment in the history of communication. That we have progressed from (1) shouting, to (2) landline telephones, to (3) cellular telephones. And that the cell phone is a truly unique communication tool, more personal than a landline due to its portability and near-guarantee of connectivity—and until now the only one that had resisted marketing’s creep.

Marketers, licensed and otherwise, well understand our enthusiastic relationship with communication technologies. That ringing phone might be a call from your best friend—or it might be a representative of Comcast, with an unbeatable special offer. There’s only one way to find out. That e-mail with the subject line “met you at the bar last weekend” might be—well, probably isn’t what you hope it is. And even as our skill at filtering advertising static has improved, marketers have grown more and more adept at targeting their messages, and cloaking them in the authentically personal. Cheesy jingles and “man on the street” testimonials have been supplanted by precision-guided ads data mined from zip code demographics, web cookies, and textual cues in Gmail messages. We have “reality” advertisements, short home movies composed by people like you and me, but advertising major brands (not for the pure joy of it—usually as an entry in a corporate-sponsored contest).

Mobile marketing will merely carry this trend to its profit-driven apotheosis. The basic technology already exists in the Bluetooth chip in your new cordless ear piece. Consider: Any cell phone equipped with Bluetooth could be commanded to broadcast a few crumbs of semipersonal information when the owner neared a particular location—when you entered a store, for example. With this data, a retailer could send you promotions tailored to (perhaps) your age, your gender, your zip code, what you’ve purchased in the past, what you might purchase in the future. Just like in Minority Report, except the retinal scanners and holograms won’t even be necessary.

I’d like to offer a name for this brave new form of marketing, complete with acronym: Targeted Advertising On Demand, or T.O.A.D. (Yes, I know—poetic license.) Note, however, whose demand it will be: not ours, but the marketers. If I sound pessimistic, it’s only because I’m already nostalgic for the good old days, when cell phones were used exclusively for talking to other human beings. The prospect of inescapable mobile marketing makes for an exhausting vision of the future—that is, unless you’re the sort of person who doesn’t get enough advertising from television, the Internet, telemarketing, spam, billboards, print ads, sandwich-board men, and the airplane banners circling above Fenway Park.

Yeah. I didn’t think so.