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Xbox One designed for tailored advertising

Several Xbox One staff members have confirmed that the Xbox One has been designed with advertising in mind, especially when it comes to incorporating the Kinect.

Xbox One will utilise the mandatory Kinect peripheral to reinvent television advertising using its new type of advertising called NUads. These will integrate gesture and voice control into the advertising found on the Xbox One and could tailor ads according to the player currently using the console.

Speaking to StickTwiddlers, several unnamed members of the Xbox Live advertising and marketing team, it has been confirmed that advertising was one of the key features in mind when designing the Xbox One.

“With the new Xbox One, the technology and Kinect has improved a lot so that actually the voice recognition, the way you speak to your Xbox and the transition between gaming and watching TV is a lot smoother, and hopefully we can transpire that into advertising that we do,” said one Technical Account Manager for Xbox Live Marketing.

Ads will be integrated into the Xbox One dashboard and will be apparently tailored to each user, potentially incorporating a TV achievement system for watching TV.

“It’s going to be an exciting transition though because the 360 console wasn’t built with advertising in mind, it was more of an afterthought, so we’ve had to adapt to the technology and how we work to fit them in to the console,” added the Technical Account Manager. “[The Xbox One] is going to have advertising in mind.”

The NUads will encourage users to speak or gesture at certain points of the ad to change them or interact with them. These are already being trialled on the Xbox 360 but with the Xbox One Kinect required to be permanently connected, we can expect a lot more of these ads.

“On Xbox, the ad is part of the actual experience, it’s not something that is outside,” said an Xbox One Senior Digital Art Director and UX Designer. “The only difference is that the advertisement we have is quite small and not disruptive so people are not aware of clocking on the banners because they know this is a part of the whole experience on the dash.”

Next, read our Xbox One vs Xbox 360 comparison.

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