Billboards With Cameras Bring Us One Step Closer to 'Minority Report'
Advertising has always been an enterprise fraught with uncertainty. How can you know if all that money you’re paying is actually making you a return? Who’s actually even giving your advertisements a look? And are those people really paying attention? With some forms of media (e.g. on the internet), these questions are relatively easy to answer, but with other forms, like billboards, it’s still a significant gamble.
Enter billboard cameras, the type that can monitor not only how many people see a billboard, but what type of people they are too:
They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon. The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.
Nothing could go wrong with this plan, right? Hit the Link and decide for yourself.
(image by flickr user simon scott)
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