INPEX Inventors Appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
COMPANIES ATTENDING INPEX® 2010
Is "Big Brother" Watching You Watch Ads?
Advertisements are everywhere. From the $2.7 million ads in this year's Super Bowl (ahem, Go Steelers!) to the foreheads of entrepreneurial college students, it's nearly impossible to go a day without seeing or hearing a marketing pitch. And here's a striking coincidence: While you're watching some of these ads, they may be watching you.
Read more articles from the February 2009 issue of InventHelp's newsletter for inventors |
InventHelp® has learned that video advertisements in malls, store windows and health clubs can include small cameras that can track your gender, approximate age and even ethnicity. What does this mean for you? This February, InventHelp explores the invention of "face-based audience measurement."
How does face-based audience measurement work? Let's say that a middle-aged man walks up to a department store window display that includes a video advertisement. Cameras detect the gender and approximate age of the man and switch the advertisement to a gender- and age-specific ad – for example, a razor commercial. When the man walks away and a teenager steps up, the ad could change to video game instead.
This technology is still in its infancy. It's so new that the name is still up for debate; in addition to face-based audience measurement, it's been called face reading, face counting and gaze tracking. Despite the shifty moniker, this technique is already making a huge impact on the way that companies target their audiences.
The development companies claim their systems are so precise that they can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time. Face-tracking technology works by associating shapes, colors and speed of movement with those already classified in the database as male or female.
"The most important features seem to be cheekbones, fullness of lips and the gap between the eyebrows," Paolo Prandoni, chief scientific officer of Quividi, told Yahoo Tech. Quividi, a French company, is one player in the face-tracking technology industry. U.S.-based competitors include Florida's TruMedia Technologies Inc., Studio IMC Inc. in New York and Starcom USA in Chicago.
Scientists are working to improve the accuracy for other factors like age; for the time being, tracking systems can group individuals into loose groups like "teen," "adult" and "senior." Ethnicity is even more difficult to define.
Even if it's not 100 percent accurate, the tracking technology invention still provides marketers with a wealth of information about who is watching their ads and for how long. This is of crucial importance to consumer companies because targeting to the desired audience means a better return on their marketing investment.
If this all sounds a little like George Orwell's 1984 to you, you're not alone. Some consumers and privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group in San Francisco, argue that cameras that study people's behavior and movements without their knowledge amounts to an invasion of privacy. The tracking manufacturers counter that none of the information retrieved by the cameras is stored and that it does not identify consumers individually (rather it classifies them in groups).
Adspace Networks Inc, a video advertising sales company with over 1,400 video screens at 105 malls around the nation, is testing the technology in six U.S. malls. Locations include St. Louis, Winston-Salem, N.C. and InventHelp's hometown of Pittsburgh. Armed with this knowledge, we at InventHelp will be sure to say "cheese" if we stop to view any video ads on our next shopping trip!
As the slumping economy makes marketing budgets ever tighter, we at InventHelp fully expect to see more inventions that help companies to personalize their ads to suit their consumers. As always, we'll keep you up to date on these latest innovations!
Back to February 2009 Newsletter
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