Taking the free PC notion to the extreme, a free house that has ads everywhere.

How many stinkfish can this idea garner? C'mon, lay 'em on!
-- syost, Jul 14 2000

MyFreeCar http://www.myfreecar.com/
Get paid for having your car wrapped in ads. [StarChaser, Jul 14 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

I don't think that's a stink-fish idea at all. I find web ads fairly easy to ignore, unless they're well done, in which case I don't mind them, and TV commercials provide crucial food-eating, book-reading, girlfriend-smooching, and bathroom-visiting time (not concurrently, natch).

The only problem I see is that advertisers must get their ads out to as wide an audience as possible, as cheaply as possible. If you spend 10 bucks on a banner ad that a thousand people will see but only 1 percent of them will purchase your 10% product, you've made a major score (note: number not to scale). If you spend 10 bucks on a wall-socket ad that 5 people will see and all of them ignore it (like I try to do), you're going to lose money.
-- centauri, Jul 14 2000


Habit-Ad for Humanity?

The single "free" PC is seen by only a few people, too; it's delivering lots of different ads to keep the number of impressions high. So, the ad-covered house would have to have screens (and pre-printed paper towels?) that display many different ads to the small set of inhabitants.
-- jutta, Jul 14 2000, last modified Jul 15 2000


Bleah! Nasty tasting idea. Can I sell my dreams to advertisers, too, so they can shill crap I don't need even while I sleep? How about the insides of the eyelids? how about condom ad-tattoos on someone's buttocks or inner thighs? why don't advertisers make swallowable plastic ads that pass through the digestive system untouched, so they can pay me to leave them in public toilets and not flush?
-- naveline, Jul 15 2000


Personally I find this pervasive advertising absolutely maddening, but I gave syost a croissant anyway. Does anyone else find it strange that people pay companies money for the privilege of walking around in clothing which says "GAP" or "Nike" or "ooooh... Pepsi!" in letters a foot high? Surely it should be the other way round: ad-subsidised clothing.
-- Skinny Rob, Jul 20 2000


Ad-funded stuff... hmm... Okay, bear with me here: Suppose you got one advertiser to fund the ads of another advertiser. That would make it unnecessary to show the first ad, as it would already be funded. Then arrange a third advertiser to fund the second one's ads, and so on---until, finally, the last advertiser would be funded by the first, creating a huge self-funding-ad-cancelling loop. Everybody makes money, and we don't have to see the ads.
-- Ander, Jul 26 2000


About the t-shirts with ads on them... Recently Dutch advertising agency KesselsKramer did a stunt for a low budget Dutch movie called Total Loss. A few weeks before the movie premiered they distributed t-shirts amongst all hip bartenders and waiters in Amsterdam. The whole city was wondering what this Total Loss was about. When the movie came out the riddle was solved. It didn't effect the number of visitors much by the way. Along this line I had the idea to start a network of waiters and bartenders and other people who work in public places to wear t-shirts with ads. They already earn very little, so with the t-shirts they can boost their income with some additional revenue. They also get some information about the product in case somebody asks them about the advertised brand. But how to verify that they are actually wearing today's t-shirt? I will make a seperate entry for this idea, please annotate there. Look for it under Business: Advertising.
-- rrr, Aug 15 2000


How about this? Offer advertisers access to the control module for the home's appliances and utilities. For a price, your television or radio could be interrupted in commercial periods by digital switching. This would give advertisers the ability to wake you up early to get the whole message or to keep you up late if the need is great enough. You'd meet resistance from paid broadcast advertisers, naturally, but who cares what they think? This would give advertisers the ability to wake you up early to get the whole message or to keep you up late if the need is great enough.
Utility companies could let you know before you warm up the oven if you've got the resources available to heat up your meal choice. This could be done by thermostatic means or by UPC scan. Smart choices could be made at subconcious levels, too. Let's say you leave the house after the heat was on all morning. When programmers see that you're on the way out, a transfer pump could pull all the hot air out of your house and put it somewhere else like your car, where someone can use it. The automatic adjustment to your power bill could be offset by a corresponding welfare benefit to the receiver of the extra energy. The whole process could be explained to you every day by your own newspaper printer in the bathroom.
-- reensure, Oct 12 2000


I think it would be a very interesting experiment. It's definitely better than the lady who lives in the see-through house, or the group of sorority girls that are video-taped 24-7. Maybe it could even solve some financial woes of lower income families who can't afford to buy housing. It could make it more affordable for people like that. The only worry would be requirements as to what products you can use in the home.
-- genuine, Nov 28 2000


I swear I saw the horse twitch. Hand me the crop.

Ads are profitable if they increase profits for the advertiser by more than the amount which is spent on them. The chance that a house (or even part of a house) would do this is pretty much zero. An unnecessary example:

If five people live in a $200,000 house for 20 years, each has $20,000 of discretionary income per year to spend, and the advertisers all make a 10% profit on what they sell, the inhabitants will have to spend every cent they have available on goods from the advertising companies which they would not otherwise have bought in order for the advertisers to break even (before all other expenses). This would be pretty silly, and these numbers are skewed absurdly heavily in favour of the idea. No amount of advertising can make buying a house for people worthwhile. Doing it for poor families is a particularly unsound variation, though a nice idea.

On the other hand, you could include exterior ads and get shut down by the city and beaten up by your neighbours and still lose vast amounts of money. Starchaser's free car is a little more attractive because it's much cheaper and is mobile (and therefore will be seen by far more people than a house). Still probably not a consistent winner; but I've had an idea for free, ad-supported sandwichboards which I will develop further and post separately.
-- Monkfish, Nov 28 2000



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