Stop worrying about 1984, it's over...

People think they hate adverts, they think they hate being marketed too, and that all promotions are evil ways of trying to suck some money out of their wallet. They think this, until they see an advert that appeals to them and makes them spend some money, then after that, they hate adverts again. 

This is how our generation is, we're all about skipping the ads on Sky Planner, ignoring them in magazines and moaning about them on websites, 

What if every advert was directly for you, what if you'd grown up in a world where advertisers only bothered you when they had something you wanted, at the price you wanted to pay for it? Then advertising isn't annoying, it's helpful. Well, this is the world we live in today, and until we stop being scared of a faux 'Big Brother Society,' and stop worrying that someone is going to download our saved games on Grand Theft Auto and a million photos of us in the pub, then our generation is never going to get there. We've got to be flexible on what we consider to be 'Orwellian Measures' and accept that fewer, more relevant messages is far more acceptable than a thousand irrelevant ones.

Web and mobile Location Services are the key to this. The kids growing up now think nothing of broadcasting their location every minute of the day on sites like Facebook and Foursquare, but us grown ups snigger at them for thinking 1984 was just a year Band Aid happened, they don't understand the dangers of people knowing where they area all the time, back in our day nobody knew where we were, and obviously that was much safer!

As ever the kids are alright, they're the ones accepting this, without knowing why they need to hide themselves all the time, or without understanding the social pressure to fear corporations and data collection, they are in fact freeing themselves from an old, crippling school of thought that opens up endless opportunity, and potentially declutters their lives from pointless communications.

Of course I don't want to publish my PIN code on Facebook and I don't want people to know when I'm doing a poo, but that's not how these things are set up, they're built with care and security and we have to trust them. Ultimately that's easier if you have nothing to hide, but Location Services aren't there to catch people out, they're there for a new generation of Nano-Targeted advertising, they're there so when you breakdown you get an advert for the AA, when you're having a party you know where to get a cake, and they're there to free you from the DFS Bank Holiday sale advert where everyone's laying on an unmade bed - unless you want a bed of course.

The youth are never wrong about these things, just like they were about The Beatles, Punk Rock and Wham Bars, they know how to live in their times. They'll laugh at us in 40 years as we cower away in an old people's home paranoid the government is spying on our phone, then they'll take us to the toilet and post on Facebook we're doing a poo, so you see, we can never win.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07738 175 614