Smart Ads for smart audience

The concept evolved from the movie “Minority Report”. In which, Tom Cruise’s character enters a mall and finds that retinal scanners identify him and prompt personalized ads that greet him by name. But the technology is not very far to implement.

Now watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store, but chance the ad is watching you too. Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden arround it, tracking who looks at screen & how long they look at it. The technology helps to change the advertisement automatically according to the gender and age of the people who are watching the advertisement.

It means that bike ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and games advertisements for kids and teens.

The manufactures of the system says that, it can determine gender 85 to 90 percent correctly. The system is not implemented at many places, but it will gradually grow.

While advertisers like the face-tracking technology, another privacy advocate, Harley Geiger, questions whether it should be used on consumers without their knowledge. Geiger, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., said advertisers should be telling consumers what details about them are being collected and for what purpose.

“With the technology proliferating, now or the short-term is the time to consider privacy protections,” he said. “If you don’t build it in at an early stage it becomes very difficult to build it into an already established system.”

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