Rather than customer DNA triggering an ad serve, it will be a wireless frequency radio transmitter (RFID) woven into their turtleneck sweater. Or an infrared-readable label sewn into off-price jeans, read at the knee as they pass a counter. That’s the new future world of mobile ad serving.

Available right now. Although it has not tech-leaped yet to ad serving, cell phones in Japan already function as electronic wallets that use built-in radio frequency devices for data exchanges and payments. This current usage points to next-step features in Smart Phones, employing RFID, cameras, scanners and recognition software.

Such nifty mobile features allow bar code scanning, comparing prices at different stores, capturing a web address/URL and storing it on a Smart Phone camera image for entry later into a web browser.

Next step. Next challenge is to not simply collect URLs that snag attention from an advertising medium (poster, soup can, billboard, cereal box, side of a bus), but drive the attentive someone to a web site. This use of mobile devices pushes past simple lists of web site URLs, but hits a few snags:

· The Smart Phone must have something to “read” with its smart new recognition technology;

· That means the billboard or cereal box must be transmitting information via radio frequencies, 2-D or matrix bar codes (which, in turn, demand in-phone scanners). Some suggest voice – speaking “Find me that bison burger from the bus card” into a Smart Phone. But voice is less promising as an info transmitter (no context, opposite-meaning sound-alike mistakes, etc.);

· Last snag: Those almost-ready info transmitters (cited above) can’t read an ad billboard unless it’s standardized. That means everything must be coded or marked for phone scans – every store window display, every product package that displays ads — with EVERYONE using the same encoding scheme. As Jim Ready of MontaVista Software told E-Commerce Times: “Google has to do it before everyone else will do it.”

Future Push Ads with Near Field Communications. This is the step that leaps to Future World. It’s the mobile advertising leap that is most exciting and demands nothing – not even a mouse click – from the target customer. To me, it’s also the quantum ad leap that’s most like futuristic film Minority Report … so, it gives me the e-creeps. But I’ll save my paranoia for last.

Auto pushing ads to users requires location-based ad serving: People pass a physical site from which ads beam to a receiver, such as their Smart Phone. Such push ads use near field technologies – WiFi, RFID, embedded short-range, Bluetooth-type low-frequency devices that “talk to” billboards. The passive ad receiver (actually a transceiver, since it also sends data to the ad-beaming billboard) need not be a mobile phone device. Those radio frequency ID labels I cited at the beginning that are sewn into clothing would do, and they do exist now in prototypes for apparel fabric manufacturers.

Look, Ma, No Mouse. Pretend you’re Tom Cruise in the film Minority Report, a former top gun in the police PreCrime Unit (PreCrime ID’s future killers and prevents murder in a time-travel way) in a futuristic Washington, D.C. Except you’re running for your life; a villain tagged you for a future murder.

You escape android enforcers by slipping into a mega mall, where you hear constant ad pitches as you run past the 22nd Century GAP store: “Welcome back, Tom. How are those Dockers pants you bought six weeks ago? We have crew neck sweaters, Tom, that will match all your ….” Fade Out as Tom Cruise passes one blabby mall board, and another starts up.

I bet those 22nd Century D.C. residents aren’t merely sporting transceivers in their clothing labels or future mobile phones. With mere RFID and near field tech, you would not hear endless and instant behavior- and individual-tracking billboards that know your every purchase … nor would the dynamically generated newspapers that gave Tom away on the subway (stories and headlines that continuously change on thin-film interactive newspapers) flip instantly to a Most Wanted Criminal photo of Cruise as he tried to hide in a train car.

Look, Ma, No Privacy. Such powerful near-field communications would have to be advanced nanotech – microscopic chip implants or nano-devices in IDs that the state tattoos on everyone. (Spoiler Alert: What dogs Tom Cruise in Minority Report is nanotech retinal eye scans. Yuck.)

Talk about irritating! I’m not the only one who gets e-creeps from this futurist scenario for mobile ad serving. It might also cause a backlash. Jim McGregor, research director at In-Stat, put it:

“How many consumers would want to walk into a shopping mall and be blasted with ads? You’d get into this whole problem with consumer privacy. Is it feasible? Yes. Would it bring up privacy concerns? You’d better believe it.”

Back to the present: The next steps in mobile, remote and near-field communications ad serving technology are getting ready for prime time today. And, they don’t rely on consumer action or clicks.