Remember the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise?

It was a pretty good science fiction movie, made before Tom Cruise went publicly off the reservation (so to speak).

One of the great things in the movie were the billboards that could recognize the person walking by and tailor the advertisement to make it more relevant to individual. It was quite creepy.

Well, the future is now. Recently a few billboards have started showing up with small cameras in them that identify your age, gender, and how long you looked at the ad. They can also detect your race, but claim not too. The camera-enabled billboards then show one ad to a middle aged woman, and another to a teenager.

Quite impressive, if you think about it.

It is amazing how much advertising has changed. Today, one of my favorite writers, Stephen C. Fehr, at The Washington Post accepted the voluntary early-retirement package. In the good-bye editorial by Fehr, I read a stunning fact: The Post lost $77 million in traditional advertising in its print edition last year, and replaced that with only $6 million in on-line advertising. I had always wondered why newspapers were taking such a bath. In some respects, I would have thought that on-line advertisinig could bring in more revenue.

Let’s face it - an online advertiser can know so much more about you compared to traditional media advertising. What city you are coming from, how you arrived at the story, how often you visit the site, what key words you used to search, the operating system and browser you prefer, how often you click on the ads, and which ads you find most palatable. And yet, actually, newspapers moving on-line can’t make as much money as they used too.

Maybe there is too much competition? Too many news sources for the size of the audience. Certainly this is a problem in the wine world. We have decent traffic, but it is only a teeny-tiny fraction of the total wine-review traffic on-line. And fighting for more traffic through advertising is tough. We depend mostly of word of mouth.

In some respects, I like the new advertising world. I generally see ads that are more relevant to me; sometimes they even provide information I am looking for. In other respects, I (like most people) am afraid of how much “the man” knows about me. It is innocuous enough now, but what about 10 years from now?

Anyway, I’m sad to see Mr. Fehr “retire”. I’m sad to see traditional news sources suffer, as I still think they provide a great service. Not many bloggers out there are really contributing news from scratch, so think we all lose a little something as the newspaper industry staggers toward collapse.