Digital out-of-home media and pervasive new technologies are bringing the internet experience into public spaces and stepping up the pace with which brands and products, as well as their virtual representations, penetrate urban environments. This article explores the current phenomenon of pervasive advertising and its underlying perceptions and puts forward a typology for describing a range of applications for the emerging media infrastructure. It argues that the critical dimensions comprise the way in which pervasive advertising and creatives exploit both physical and social contexts by increasingly relying on the effects of illumination, temporality and spatiality.
IntroductionTechnology mediates day-to-day experience in cities more than anywhere else, and pervasive advertising is fast becoming an integral part of such postmodern urban environments. Advertising relies on pervasive digital infrastructures and has become a salient feature in popular culture, where shopping has long since developed into a centrally important activity. The city is reinventing itself as a communication hub in which pervasive advertising generally plays a decisive role in creating an emotionally charged environment that is crucial for shaping the behavior of shoppers, tourists and inhabitants.From a sociological perspective, these emerging media in public spaces are manifestations of two social trends: continuing digitization and convergence (first pervading and transforming the workplace, then the private sphere, and now the public space), and a societal shift away from consuming goods and service towards
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.