"Some of the best-loved technology on the planet" is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It's a fair description.
But the love that consumers send Apple's way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics.
Filing a patent application does not necessarily mean the company plans to use the technology. But the application shows, at the least, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an "enforcement routine" that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.
Its distinctive feature is a design that does not simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
The system also has a version for music players, inserting commercials that come with an audible prompt to press a particular button to verify the listener's attentiveness.
The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads. If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device ad-free on a temporary or permanent basis.
Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away personal computers engineered to display on-screen ads continuously?
What the application calls the "enforcement routine" entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing, to confirm that the user is paying attention.
These tests "can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test", the application says. One option makes the response box smaller and smaller, requiring more concentration to find and banish. Or the system can require the user press varying keyboard combinations, the current date, or the name of the advertiser upon command, again demonstrating "the presence of an attentive user."
Everything about this technology seems so antithetical to the guiding principles of Apple that one would naturally wonder whether Steve Jobs even knows whether his company filed a patent application for such a thing.
Yet Jobs, named by Fortune magazine this month as "CEO of the decade", is directly connected to this particular patent application: his name is the first listed of the five inventors. This is a rarity, occurring only four times among the 30 applications on which he is co-inventor that have been published by the patent office since March last year.
The approach presented in Apple's patent application is myopic. Were the company to use the new technology, it is hard to imagine how free, ad-supported versions of its products would not have a negative impact on its brand.
The technology may be clever and original enough to earn Apple a patent. But the resulting products are likely to be more irritating than beloved.
