“Billboards are, for the most part, 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.” [New York Times]
Perhaps what I really want to know is how they work. Front yards bristle with these things leading up to any election (local or national). So they must work at some level but I can’t get my mind around how.
Mic flags are those little plastic signs that radio and TV reporters attach to the end of their microphones. It’s a little harmless self-promotion. Let’s the public know that KXYZ News or TV24 was on-the-scene. And we radio guys love it when our mic flag appears on the 6 o’clock local TV newscast or the front page of the Daily Bugle.