Mr.Friendly is a Dutch startup that invented a smart urinal, first spotted by The Next Web. It’s a urinal, with a small screen on top that companies can manage remotely to serve ads to customers. The Mr.Friendly urinals aren’t just dumb screens. No, no, they’re equipped with sensors to detect when you’re taking a leak, and only show you the ads then. Because it’s a smart urinal.
The company’s pitch is that the urinal is “guaranteed to capture 40 seconds of a gentleman’s attention,” noting that the best time to serve someone an ad is when that “person cannot escape to do something else, and can only focus on your message,” which I guess applies here.
Incidentally, The Next Web cites an account from someone who actually encountered one of the smart urinals in the real world, where, like any good smart product, it had stopped working.
Look, I could write another couple hundred words on this and work in a couple more bad urinal jokes, but seriously: if you need to show ads to customers in your bathrooms that badly, please save yourself, your customers, your advertisers, and basically everyone else’s dignity and just put up posters.
