Xbox One is becoming a great ad for the PS4

Kinect
The compulsory Kinect means advertisers can watch you

In the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, something terrible happens to an entire town: aliens invade, replacing every human with a doppelgänger.

I think something similar is happening right now, but instead of space aliens the culprit is Sony - and instead of a Californian town, it's replaced everybody involved in selling the Xbox One.

I'm serious. How else can we explain the curious unmarketing campaign Microsoft's running, where every week brings news of yet another reason to get a PS4 instead? With the dust from the pre-owned/always-on tomfoolery only just settling, we now discover that the Xbox One is all about ads.

Advertising execs excepted, hands up who thought: "Well, my Xbox 360 is good and all, but I really wish it was built more with advertising in mind"? Who's just gagging to spend several hundred pounds on a new console, games and an Xbox LIVE sub so that they can interact with carefully selected third parties?

There's only one possible explanation. It's the invasion of the Xbox Snatchers!

Bad ads

According to Microsoft, advertising was an "afterthought" with the Xbox 360: the console's focus was on gaming, not bugging you with ads. Microsoft's goal of playing "a significant role in TV advertising" wasn't really possible until the launch of the New Xbox Experience in 2011, and this time around it's thinking about advertising from the get-go.

Speaking to StickTwiddlers, Xbox Live advertising team members outlined the glorious Kinect-monitored future.

Your console will use Kinect to work out who's in the room and your Xbox LIVE account to mine your demographic information, and it'll use that data to more precisely target advertising. That advertising will be more intrusive than before, too, because we're too good at ignoring ads.

The reason we're so good at ignoring ads is because many of us don't want them, and the reason most of us don't want them is because advertising is often awful: aggressive, invasive, interruptive and often irrelevant.

Done well, advertising is fine, but advertising is often done very, very badly. There's a big difference between a banner telling you there's new DLC for one of your favourite games and an ad that gets in your face or prevents you from doing something - or an ad that tries to tempt your kids to play some hideous branded Kinect "experience".

That prospect's enough to keep me from pre-ordering.

We call the Xbox One a console, but it isn't really: it's Microsoft's latest attempt to take over TV, something it's been trying and largely failing to do since the 1990s - remember WebTV or the parade of Windows Media Centers?

With the Xbox 360, gaming was the priority and ads were an afterthought. With the Xbox One, have those positions been reversed?

TOPICS
Carrie Marshall
Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.

Latest in Xbox One
Xbox One and controller
It's official: Microsoft says it won't make any more new games for the Xbox One
Black and white Xbox One
Now is the best time to buy an Xbox One
Forza Motorsport trailer screenshot
The next Forza Motorsport game may come to Xbox One after all
Elden Ring on Xbox One
Don’t buy Elden Ring on Xbox One
Factory reset Xbox One
How to factory reset an Xbox One, Xbox One S and Xbox One X
Elden Ring
Elden Ring may look amazing even on Xbox One consoles
Latest in News
Twitter social media application change logo to X. Elon Musk CEO of twitter rebranded Twitter to 'X'. Social media application technology concept.
X is down again – here's everything we know about Twitter's third outage of the day
Nvidia geforce rtx 3050
RTX 5050 rumors detail full spec of desktop graphics card, suggesting Nvidia may use slower video RAM – but I wouldn’t panic yet
OnePlus 13
OnePlus is ditching the Alert Slider for an iPhone-style customizable button - and I’ll be sad to see it go
healthcare
Software bug meant NHS information was potentially “vulnerable to hackers”
Q Acoustics Q SUB80, QSUB100 and QSUB120 subwoofers
Q Acoustics wants to bring the bass to your post-Oscars movie catch-up
Hospital
Major Oracle outage hits US Federal health record systems