Billboard Ads May be Watching you Like Big Brother
2 Comments By Eran Abramson on June 4th, 2008 in Hi Tech News
Are Billboard Ads effective, useless, or perhaps a waste of money? Do they interfere with your daily activities or provide you a colorful and creative insight to the millions of products offered? Marketers want to actually figure out how much advantages or disadvantages Billboards provide, so they went with a Big Brother format to see how much we are watching them.
The Billboards will be looking back using tiny cameras installed in separate spots. They will determine when a person is actually looking and standing in front of the ad, and their reaction towards different content. In addition, they will fine tune it to assess the individual’s features, age, gender and more.
The companies involved in such technology claim that privacy is not an issue since they are not actually recording those watching. Still, that is something us as consumers can just take their word for it, but never actually know. Moreover, although they said they would not segment based on race, it is claimed the technology is capable if desired.
This is meant to research the end-consumers in order to target ads to the different people passing by who are scanning billboards daily. It is hoped that just like it is attempted on the Internet, Billboards would be able to segment and provided a more targeted campaign to correct individuals. In other words, the ads will change according to the person viewing them but in an offline location and time.
Neat idea, but is there a major privacy issue at hand? Would you feel comfortable just looking at ads, realizing they may actually be watching you?
Via: Crunchgear, picture from Global Graphica
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Related Tags: big brother, big brother is watching you, billboard camera, billboard marketing, billboard security, marketing privacy
June 5th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
This creeps me out! Maybe because I’m old enough to have read 1984 before 1984, and now realize that it’s all slowly coming true a bit late.
Personally I hate billboards and flashy ads. I find them irritating at the very least and offensive at the worst. I’ve rarely ever looked at a billboard and said, “oh, I have to have that. Let me go buy it now.”
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
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