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Billboards That Look Back
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
May 31, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?_r=4&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
In advertising these days, the brass
ring goes to those who can measure
everything — how many people see a
particular advertisement, when they see
it, who they are. All of that is easy on
the Internet, and getting easier in
television and print.
Billboards are a different story. For
the most part, they are still a relic of
old-world media, and the best guesses
about viewership numbers come from foot
traffic counts or highway reports,
neither of which guarantees that the
people passing by were really looking at
the billboard, or that they were the
ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced
technology to solve that problem. 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.
“Everything we do is completely
anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the
founder and chief scientific officer of
Quividi, a two-year-old company based in
Paris that is gearing up billboards in
the United States and abroad. Quividi
and its competitors use small digital
billboards, which tend to play short
videos as advertisements, to reach
certain audiences.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi
camera was installed on a billboard on
Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in
Manhattan that was playing a trailer for
“The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on
the cable channel A&E.
“I didn’t see that at all, to be
honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old
lawyer, when the camera was pointed out
to him by a reporter. “That’s
disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an
invasion of one’s privacy.”
Organized privacy groups agree, though
so far the practice of monitoring
billboards is too new and minimal to
have drawn much opposition. But the
placement of surreptitious cameras in
public places has been a flashpoint in
London, where cameras are used to look
for terrorists, as well as in Lower
Manhattan, where there is a similar
initiative.
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 guess one would expect that if you go
into a closed store, it’s very likely
you’d be under surveillance, but out
here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At
the least, he said, there should be a
sign alerting people to the camera and
its purpose.
Quividi’s technology has been used in
Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s
restaurants in Singapore, but it has
just come to the United States. Another
Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia
commuter station with an advertisement
for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor
football team. Both Quividi-equipped
boards were installed by Motomedia, a
London-based company that converts
retail and street space into
advertisements.
“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.
“You could make them conspicuous,” he
said of video cameras. “But nobody
really wants to do that because the more
people know about it, the more it may
freak them out or they may attempt to
avoid it.”
And the issue gets thornier: the
companies that make these systems, like
Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say
that with a slight technological
addition, they could easily store
pictures of people who look at their
cameras.
The companies say they do not plan to do
this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their
intentions were beside the point. The
companies are not currently storing
video images, but they could if
compelled by something like a court
order, he said.
For now, “there’s nothing you could go
back to and look at,” said George E.
Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia
who was previously a marketing executive
at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do
is look at the audience, process what it
sees and convert that to digital fields
that we upload to our servers.”
TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of
surveillance work for the Israeli
government. The company, whose slogan is
“Every Face Counts,” is testing the
cameras in about 30 locations
nationwide. One TruMedia client is
Adspace Networks, which runs a network
of digital screens in shopping malls and
is testing the system at malls in
Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C.,
and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens
show a mix of content, like the top
retail deals at the
mall that day, and advertisements for
DVDs, movies or consumer products.
Within advertising circles, these camera
systems are seen as a welcome answer to
the longstanding problem of how to
measure the effectiveness of billboards,
and how to figure out what audience is
seeing them. On television, Nielsen
ratings help marketers determine where
and when commercials should run, for
example. As for signs on highways,
marketers tend to use traffic figures
from the Transportation Department; for
pedestrian billboards, they might hire
someone to stand nearby and count people
as they walk by.
The Internet, though, where publishers
and media agencies can track people’s
clicks for advertising purposes, has
raised the bar on measurement. Now, it
is
prodding billboards into the 21st
century.
“Digital has really changed the
landscape in the sort of accuracy we can
get in terms of who’s looking at our
creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice
president for marketing for A&E, said of
Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr.
Slattery said, he hoped to get similar
information from what advertisers refer
to as the out-of-home market.
“We’re always interested in getting
accurate data on the audience we’re
reaching,” he said, “and for
out-of-home, this promises to give a
level of accuracy we’re not used to
seeing in this medium.”
Industry groups are scrambling to
provide their own improved ways of
measuring out-of-home advertising. An
outdoor advertising association, the
Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital
billboard and sign association, the
Out-of-Home Video Advertising
Association, are both devising more
specific measurement standards that they
plan to release by the fall.
Even without cameras, digital billboards
encounter criticism. In cities like
Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor
advertising companies face opposition
from groups that call their signs
unsightly, distracting to drivers and a
waste of energy.
There is a dispute over whether digital
billboards play a role in highway
accidents, and a national study on the
subject is expected to be completed this
fall by a unit of the Transportation
Research Board. The board is part of a
private nonprofit institution, the
National Research Council.
Meanwhile, privacy concerns about
cameras are growing. In Britain, which
has an estimated 4.2 million
closed-circuit television cameras — one
for every 14 people — the matter has
become a hot political issue, with some
legislators proposing tight restrictions
on the use and distribution of the
footage.
Reactions to the A&E billboard in
Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to
be in the marketing,” said Antwann
Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after
being told about the camera. “I guess
it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel
safe looking at it.”
But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone
down the street can watch you looking at
it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan
Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.
Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a
dairy, said: “You could be recorded on
the street, you could be recorded in a
drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter
to me. There’s cameras everywhere.” |
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