The launch of the Xbox One next month could change the landscape of product marketing, pushing consumers to look for production values and furthering "gamification" elements in advertising, according to Microsoft vice president of marketing and strategy Yusuf Mehdi.
Speaking with Advertising Age, Mehdi said the Xbox One's advanced imaging technology will cause consumers to look for higher production values in ads, as well as entertainment experiences that meld together the use gaming hardware, TV and mobile devices — such as the NFL apps Microsoft plans to launch with their new console.
Mehdi also noted that making data collected from Xbox One users available for market research could assist with this endeavor. Examining how consumers use the Xbox One could provide marketers with better ideas of how to engage people with advertising.
"We are trying to bridge some of the world between online and offline," he explained. "That's a little bit of a holy grail in terms of how you understand the consumer in that 360 degrees of their life. 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.
Mehdi also suggested the Xbox One's ability to detect whether or not users are paying attention — or if their bodies are responds to advertising — could affect pricing, possibly for products or the ads themselves.
"It could have a big impact on pricing," he said.
The Xbox One will launch on Nov. 22 in the U.S and the U.K. as well as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand and Spain. The console is expected to launch in other markets in 2014.