In Japan, test billboards that know your gender and age

You may have already heard about Japanese developments in the field of outdoor advertising, in particular billboards that can be recognized by a man in front of him or a woman and display personalized advertising. Now these shields and image scanning systems will appear at Tokyo metro stations.

A consortium of 11 railway companies has launched a pilot project that will last for a year, as part of which 27 pilot billboards will be installed. You could see similar shields in the sci-fi movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise. Advertising media from the film could recognize people by name and shout out personal advertising offers, the real development was less able. The experimental shields use cameras and specially software for recognition and so far can only determine the gender and age of passers-by.

“A camera can distinguish a person’s gender and determine the approximate age if a person walks in front of the display and looks at it for at least a second,” reports Franz Press.
The goal of the project, at least for now, is to collect data about which people look at which ads at what time of day. Once this data can be obtained, marketers will be able to use it to plan the strategies of their advertising campaigns. And it seems that advertising can be configured in such a way as to show this or that video, depending on who goes by. Of course, quite generalized: nail polish and romance novels for girls, large HD TVs and black leather chairs for guys, red sports cars for middle-aged people, etc.

Officials representing the project promise that images captured by cameras will not be preserved, although this is unlikely to reassure those who are concerned about the importance of privacy. All of these large screens and interactive billboards are more than just gigantic billboards. And I want to believe that they will never be able to read our thoughts, since it is unlikely that anyone would want to go next to a billboard that shows something specifically for us, but which we would hardly want to admit publicly.



According to CNET