Billboard Cameras

Posted on May 31, 2008

In advertising, success is assured and money is made by those who figure out how to measure everything — to find out the who, what, how, when, where, and why. All of that is pretty easy on the Internet, determining exactly who is seeing your ads and targeting your market very precisely.

But there are some ad areas where it has been almost impossible to get good information. For instance, you place a billboard ad and hope. There’s just not much good that can be determined. If it is a billboard on a roadside, you can take traffic data and try to get something from it, but not much. You don’t know how many people are in each car, who they are, and most importantly, you don’t even know if they look at your ad. A little more info can be gained from pedestrian billboards. You can hire someone to watch and take counts of the foot traffic, see how many look at your ad, and note their age, gender, and race.

Now, however, for those pedestrian type billboards there is a new approach. With technological advances, cameras can now be placed in the ads to gather details of the people who stop to view the ad. Using special software, determinations can be made about a person’s gender (based on calculations about facial structure), and age. All of this info is then sent to a central database for analysis.
So far developers are not categorizing race, but they say they can, and will. They also are not taking actual pictures, though that will probably happen later on.
In addition to learning who the audience is, targeted ads can be displayed. Since these are mostly digital billboards rather than the traditional ones, it will be no problem for me to stand in front of one, get analyzed as fat, and see a NutriSystem commercial. I can see the next generation of these will read my mind and then project an ad based on what I’m thinking about at the moment.

As you can imagine, privacy advocates will be all over this new technology…