Kinect 2.0 to drive targeted, integrated Xbox One advertising platform

Advertising has been a central element in the design process behind not only the Xbox One but also the Kinect 2.0 camera, Microsoft has said.

That’s according to StickTwiddlers which travelled to Microsoft’s London office earlier this week to meet with Xbox Live’s advertising team.

Although none of the employees spoken to are mentioned by name, here’s a selection of what they had to say:

• 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 whereas this new one is going to have advertising in mind. So a lot of the limitations that we have now, hopefully the release of the boundaries will widened so the opportunities will be a lot greater.”

• On Xbox, the ad is part of the actual experience, it’s not something that is outside. The only difference is that the advertisement we have is quite small and not disruptive so people are not aware of clicking on the banners because they know this is a part of the whole experience on the dash. So the users know that this is something that when they click on it, they won’t be hit by something crazy or something dangerous like on the web. Everything that lands there, we create.”

• 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.”

Interestingly, Microsoft also said that advertisers have their own specific API for Kinect which is slightly” limited compared to game devs due to privacy issues.

• This sort of works at two levels. There’s the game producers who have a different API, so a different set of code and system that they use, and they’ve got a lot more control of the whole thing whereas from the advertising point of view we have a slightly more limited set, which is designed to protect the user. The company is very keen on protecting the user from any sort of abuse so we can’t do certain things.”