ChasNote

Paris-based Quividi has created software that enables video cameras in billboards to determine a rough demographic profile of the person looking at the ad:

“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.”

What happens if I’m walking by a billboard on a day I happen to be wearing a dress?!

In addition to solving the relevance problem (serving the right ads based on demographic-recognition algorithms), consumer acceptance may be an issue:

“Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance…. ‘I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,’ said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.”