Fairly recently, Microsoft have been making a lot of changes to the Xbox One including coming out and talking about the very touchy subject of giving away information gathered by the new kinect This was supposedly put to rest by Xbox’s Marketing executive, Albert Penello stating:
“Some of the new Xbox One Kinect features *could* be used in advertising – since we can see expressions, engagement, etc. and how that might be used to target advertising. This is the point that seems to draw some controversy. First – nobody is working on that. I’m not aware of any active work in this space. Second – if something like that ever happened, you can be sure it wouldn’t happen without the user having control over it. Period.”
That should be a weight off gamers minds but on Saturday, Microsoft had something very different to say. In a presentation called, “Winning the Game: Xbox Marketing“, Yusuf Mehdi (another Marketing Executive) stated that there is a possibility of making data available for market research:
“We are trying to bridge some of the world between online and offline. We have a pretty unique position at Microsoft because of what we do with digital, as well as more and more with television because of Xbox. It’s early days, but we’re starting to put that together in more of a unifying way, and hopefully at some point we can start to offer that to advertisers broadly”
So why are two high ranking marketing executives contradicting each other? Just what is going on?
What do you think of this news? Does this bother you? Or do you just not care about it?