A smart billboard that would use microphones, cameras and other
sensors to bring personalized advertising to outdoor displays.
Web
giant, Yahoo is set to revolutionize outdoor advertising with a new
smart billboard that can spy on anyone in other to serve them with
targeted ads to its audience.
One
of the biggest goals of advertising is to successfully connect to an
audience and make them purchase the endorsed product or service. Not
everyone, however, can easily be lured in. Personalized advertising
tries to solve this, where ad companies try to learn what a specific
customer wants by knowing their information and movements.
With
this in consideration, web portal Yahoo, still fresh from the hack
reveal two weeks ago, has filed for a new patent for a new billboard
containing sensors which can watch, listen, and capture bio-metric data
from people to target them with personalized advertisements.
According
to the patent, which was published this Thursday, the billboards would
be equipped with cameras, microphones, motion-proximity sensors, as well
as biometric sensors like fingerprint or retinal scanning. These
gadgets would then be used to track the engagement of the audience to
the advertisement. Yahoo explains further:
“For
example, image data or motion-proximity sensor data may be processed to
determine whether any members of the audience paused or slowed down near
the advertising content, from which it may be inferred that the pause
or slowing was in response to the advertising content (eg, a measurement
of ‘dwell time’).”
Aside from this data, the smart
billboard can also capture audio information. This will then be
processed using speech recognition technology to gather keywords
relating to the ad that are spoken by the people that approach the
billboard.
Yahoo, through the patent application, argues that the
personalization of ads on the smartphone has made mobile the most
efficient place to do advertising, compared to public digital displays,
which use old technology.
To be able to cater to many people at
one time, Yahoo aims to ‘grouplize’ advertisements. Instead of
individually targeting people, the ad content would be based on
real-time information of a crowd of people who may be on the freeway, or
the train. For example, a smart billboard would be placed on the part
of a freeway where traffic sensors are located, to be able to detect how
many cars are passing, and how fast they are going.
The sensors
could also capture images of vehicles on the road, and identify their
maker and model, to be able to come up with demographic data which could
be used for a new advertisement.
Furthermore, the billboard could
use cell-tower data, mobile app location data, or image data to
“identify specific individuals in the target audience, the demographic
data which can then be aggregated to represent all or a portion of the
target audience.”
“Those of skill in the art will
appreciate from the diversity of these examples the great variety of
ways in which an aggregate audience profile may be determined or
generated using real-time information representing the context of the
electronic public advertising display and/or additional information from
a wide variety of sources.”
Lastly, the company
notes that the ad system’s potential to become integrated with current
ad exchanges, reaching other audiences across devices with similar
advertisements used on the smart billboard.
Read More
