Video Adverts On the Printed Page

An anonymous reader writes "Prepare yourself. A staple of near-future sci-fi—magazine video ads—are now a thing of the present. And which high-tech magazine is leading the charge? Wired? Popular Mechanics? Nope. Successful Farming. The advertisement itself is for a pesticide that protects crops against nematodes. You can see a video of the video here."

Mute button

[thomasinx]

Did anyone catch whether or not there was a mute button? I could see an ad with audio like that being incredibly annoying when reading in a public place.

Overall though, I think this is an interesting trend. I definitely wonder whether or not the benefit of such an ad outweighs the cost of all the extra hardware...

Landfill...

[bennomatic]

Aren't there a lot of "bad things* in computers and monitors? Isn't it bad enough the ones on our desktops turn over every few years? Can you imagine if hundreds of thousands of these ended up in the landfill every month? Forgive me if I sound like a kneejerk hippy, but this just doesn't seem at all green.

Re:Mute button

[camperdave]

Did anyone catch whether or not there was a mute button?

I would imagine that it is like those musical greeting cards: close the page, and it shuts off.

Re:Mute button

[246o1]

This is the kind of thing that will make me want to carry around a hammer or an EMP device. Ads already pollute enough of my life.

Looks cool, but

[Max Romantschuk]

Is it just me, or isn't that horrendously fucking ridiculously wasteful? Environmentally, that is.

Re:Landfill...

[Spacezilla]

Doesn't matter, that post will surely get modded up to the maximum as Insightful in no time.

Not quite the future I imagined

[Adrian Lopez]

I used to dream about newspapers that had video where the pictures would normally go, but otherwise the pages with video didn't look any different from the pages you see in real newspapers. It's not as impressive when the video screen is small and the page is as thick as cardboard.

What's in a name?

[tgv]

Nobody noticed the abbreviation for Successful Farming is SF?

Re:Landfill...

[gringer]

Well, actually, the way you are meant to be moderating (according to the /. underlords) can be found here [slashdot.org]. It's almost the reverse of what you suggest. Quote unrelated:

• Insightful -- An Insightful statement makes you think, puts a new spin on a given story (or aspect of a story). An analogy you hadn't thought of, or a telling counterexample, are examples of Insightful comments.
• Interesting -- If you believe a comment to be Interesting (and it's not mostly Redundant, Offtopic, or otherwise lame), it is.

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[0WaitState]

There's no technology helping with ethanol production, unless you consider technology oriented towards lobbying congresscritters. There's only a tiny, tiny band of US farmland where one can grow corn efficiently enough to achieve a small (1.01 coefficient) energy-positive margin for the ethanol produced. Everywhere else it's a subsidised net energy loss--you use more petroleum products fertilizing, transporting product, and moving water than you save with the ethanol generated.

My country tis of thee, sweet land of subsidy.

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[longhairedgnome]

Same effect you get from all the corn products you eat?

Boring

[KritonK]

I wanted to watch the video on the magazine, for the geekiness of it, and was bored, watching the fancy graphics, while I was waiting for the name of the advertised product (which I have already forgotten, as the tech was more impressive than the name of an unknown product) to appear.

Now that I've seen what it's all about, and the novelty is lost, there is no way I am going to wait 45 seconds per page, to watch a <censored> video, while leafing through a magazine. In fact, I won't even notice there is a video, as it took a couple of seconds for the video to switch on, by which time I will have turned the page. If they cannot attract my attention with what's printed on the page, I am not going to see their ad!

This new technology does offer some interesting possibilities, though. Imagine, e.g., that I somehow get hold of my competitor's video, before it is published. I then create a video for my competing product, whose audio track is (inverse of competitor's audio track) + "competitor's products are useless" + (pitch for my product), then pay the magazine handsomely to publish my ad next to the competitor's, so that they are both activated when readers open the magazine at that page. Loads of fun!

Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge

[twitcher101]

So are farmers smart enough to know that if you kill nematodes, you kill the soil and are therefore fully dependent on chemical companies if you want to keep farming? Are they smart enough to know that you should NEVER use this product? Most I have talked to lately insist its impossible to produce food without chemicals, which just isn't true. In fact, most studies show that the surpluses would be larger without chemicals limiting the environment. We might have to eat more than five crops and not use corn in everything (but then it isn't in ANY of my cookbooks, so why is corn syrup in all my food?). Unfortunately, your examples above of early adoption suggest that farmers go for "shiny" things, rather than useful tech. Try getting them to adopt precision fertilization using GPS, and they balk, because it isn't about the environment, its only about yield maps. So the shiny advert will convince them to make the soil into a barren substrate...