The scene is so memorable: Tom Cruise hustling about a mall in Minority Report.  All around him, targeted, interactive ads speak to him.

After obtaining the eye of one Mr. Yakamoto, and entering a Gap store, the interactive employee incorrectly/correctly identifies Mr. Yakamoto and asks him about his previous purchase.

Ahhh, the future is brilliant, is it not?!  Hoverboards and jetpacks and Jetson’s-style walkways.  Yes!

Discluding the “magic carpet” walkways in airports, none of those technologies have seen their mainstream debut.  But the marvelous interactivity from Minority Report is on its way.

We have yet to reach the actual Minority Report-style adverts, but interactivity has seen tremendous boosts lately.

Consider Ford’s interactive poster o’er in Germany.  An actor views mall-goers through a tiny video camera.  He reacts to, and interacts with, these unsuspecting participants.  It is “active ambient” advertising, if you will.

MINI took outdoor advertising to an interactive place by linking participants in “The Club” with RFID key chains.  In a sense, users opted-in to this interactivity.

And Mark Ecko created this serious bus stop time-passer: an interactive billboard that connects to Bluetooth-enabled cell phones (which, if your phone is anything past the black-on-yellow models, is likely your phone), allowing the connected individual to tag the billboard.

On Curtis J. Morley listed some ways that advertisers can currently target ads interactively:

• Cell phones - It has a unique number, it is with us constantly and the French are using cell phones to do location advertising currently.
• Key Fob - Most employees will carry around an electronic key card that allows them into a building these have personal identifiers on them such as name and company.
• PDA - My PDA has Bluetooth, IR, and Wifi and much personal information.
• Gaming Device - PSP among others have wireless capabilities. Why not send a simple signal out to the advertising terminal as a kid walks into target to display a companion game or upgrade for the game that is currently being played?
• Credit Cards - Newer cards are containing RFID and can be scan rathered than slid.
• Medical Devices - Medical devices are being tagged with personal identifiers in case of theft.
• Medical ID tags - A simple scan of a necklace or wrist bracelet with a small amount of OCR and the person is easily identified.
• Cars - GM and OnStar, Honda, Infiniti etc… all have a GPS device within the car. This data can be read and matched with DMV records at any time.
• GPS Devices
• Facial Recognition software - The creepy big brother devices that I saw at ComDEX. The camera took a picture of me and from that point on any time I was even close to booth the camera locked onto me and displayed my name and info.
• Retinal scanners -already at use in some airports
• Watches - Fossil, among others, are now carrying a bluetooth line of watches.
• Pets - Most pets are now carrying an identification chip inside of them that could easily be used to change an interactive poster into an advertisement of dog food or the latest in neutering.

New technologies are in beta testing that will allow interactive ads to correctly identify a person’s gender, age (in a range), and possibly even ethnicity.

A single billboard could have targeted ads for a razor (for men), a fragrance (for women), and a video game (for teens).

Not only can end-users experience a highly-targeted, relevant experience, but advertisers can resell the same space several times, all the while collecting intense amounts of data: what types of people are stopping, and for how long.  (And that’s just the start…)

To borrow (and then maliciously repackage for my own selfish purposes) Hoover’s new Platinum-series model slogan: Data hounds rejoice.

The “Big Brother” connotations are there.  Are you perturbed or excited by the dawning of this new level of interactivity?

Our boys @ Google have done it again: analytics for Flash!  According to Mashable, “The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it.”

The second problem, mobile, is being addressed.  Adobe has already demonstrated its latest release, Flash Player 10, “running on Nokia’s Symbian operating system, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Google’s Android. Real Flash, not Flash Lite. That leaves the Blackberry and iPhone platforms as the major holdouts in the Flash-free zone.”  (ZDNet)

The first problem, now has an answer.  And what does this mean for marketers?  More authenticity, honest, and accountibility!  “Advertisers can now (in theory) pay for actual engagement, because it can be accurately measured.”  (Mashable)

Sprout Builder is an interesting tool for developers. Now, users who publish widgets and other Flash apps using Sprout can track metrics such as time spent, what links and objects users click within an app, and goal tracking – all from within the same Google Analytics account as their website.

Yes.  Ma’am.  Yes.

If we can answer the third problem, indexing for search engines, then the creative world as we know it will change instantly.  And who better than Adobe to change the game?

Unless you’ve been living under a large rock for the last few years you are very familiar with the popular Google owned site - YouTube.  StartYourTube.com is a new player that has just emerged online.  Just like Ning enables users to build their own custom social networking sites for free - StartYourTube allows users to create their own custom video sharing sites totally free and it takes just 2 minutes. 

The site is currently promoting monthly cash giveaways of $500 to the Top Tubers.