NY Times has a gaze at face-tracking “controversy”

Maybe I’m naive, but the whole fuss that seems to be bubbling up about face tracking technology for digital billboards and screens has that much ado about nothing feel to it.

As an old newspaper editor I have too many times been in slow news day planning meetings that ended up with reporters being sent out to find people who were upset with something or other, often people who weren’t terribly well informed on the issue of the day or who had all of 10 seconds to develop an opinion.

Now the New York Times has smarter people than the papers I worked for — they hired me, so they were obviously damaged souls — but they nonetheless sent out a reporter and did a piece that really reaches to drum up a fuss.

Saturday’s edition has a story headlined “Billboards that look back” – which starts with a set-up of how the out of home industry is experimenting with biometric face-tracking technology that can count and even demographically segment faces.

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.

Eeeek!!!!

OK, so first of all companies like Quividi, TruMedia, CognoVision and Video Mining don’t capture faces and record them. The software just uses little cameras to count faces that engage with a screen and then try to sort out demographics like age and gender, and eventually very general ethnicity. The images are not stored and the guys who run these companies uniformly say they don’t want to do that.

The surveillance cameras in public areas are completely different animals and the linkage between the two is at best tenuous.

The story floats the idea that a government could push a court order to force a switch to start storing recorded faces, but that’s a lot more than flicking a switch. It’s re-engineering the products, adding MUCH more bandwidth, and probably changing the gear at each location to actually pull that off.

This versus using surveillance gear already in place in many or most retail and public environments.

If people are going to get jumpy about the privacy issue of a little gadget sorting out if you are looking at a screen or not, and vaguely capturing your demographics, then I guess they have troubled lives. How do they react when there are people in stores with clipboards counting people and watching what they do?

There are also other widely used devices that can be used to track where you go and what you do. They’re called credit cards and cell phones, to name just a couple.

How to do cinemas well …

The guys at Minicom — whose blog is always much more than a soap box for the company’s gear — have a great set of photos showing a new install at a movie house in the UK. The install shows targeted screens over the concessions areas, ticketing and along the hallways in poster format. It looks really well executed.

South African operator reports big-time sales impacts across retail network

As reported in a blog called espaces, South African firm One Digital Media’s CEO told the crowd at a recent Marketing-at-Retail Workshop in Johannesburg how research is showing significant sales impacts in installed locations.

Mike Bosman said independent research conducted recently on 22 brands showed those brands stood out 33% more when the particular brand advertises on screen, and awareness of the screen by the shopper was mapped to a 29.6% boost in sales made.

In the past year, One Digital Media has driven the roll-out of a first-of-its-kind digital network – with over 5000 screens installed in hundreds of supermarkets, shebeens, liquor stores and other outlets country-wide, and the system is working with 98% compliance.

Many of the installations have been in Spar stores and are able to run up to 45 screens and 45 channels per store – and the impact of the content that’s been broadcast is reported to be a considerable 9.6% average increase in sales for the brands that advertised using the digital media infrastructure, content development and delivery mechanisms that One Digital Media has pioneered.

Content is flighted to any one particular screen in the network around South Africa or to any group of screens. In-store digital networks typically do not flight TV commercials as the screens do not broadcast sound and shoppers do not hang around for 30 seconds watching the screens. Content is very short and the placement and positioning of the screens in the store is critically important to their effectiveness.

Shebeens, by the way, are unlicensed but allowed pubs, usually in the townships.

Loto-Quebec screens

I am at the main office in wonderful Montreal for a couple of days, mainly for the last of three Ingram Micro show and tell sessions.

Spotted in a couple of stores, Loto-Quebec’s approach to digital screens. They did a trial with a local company, but ultimately opted to build out their own solution, cooked up by the IT group.

The screens are 4:3 20 inchers, I think, and are mounted BELOW eye level, which is a very different approach. I didn’t look closely — I had a pressing engagement at some place called MacLean’s (19 types on tap!) — but I think the screens are attached to the actual wagering terminals.

The pic is from a Jean Coutu store, the dominant chain drug in Francophone Canada. Boy, the “Oh dear, there’s a nutbar in the store” looks you get when you ask if it is OK to take a snappie of this stuff.

Big-ass Walgreens’ board to dwarf other LED screens in Times Square

Walgreens is opening chain drug stores in the US at a record pace, so why not set another record – the biggest big-ass LED board.

Tech blog Gizmodo is reporting via a couple of other sources that the retailer is installing a capital M Massive LED board at its flasgship store in the global centre of slowly rotating and gawking in circles.

The company is building the world’s “most complex, powerful and digitally advanced” sign to hover over their new flagship store. And 17,000 feet of it is covered with 12 million LEDs capable of producing a trillion colors. But that’s only part of the sign.

250,000 pounds in weight, the entire sign spans 43,720 square feet when including vinyl components. That easily trumps the old Times Square champion from NASDAQ, which covered a suddenly modest 11,000 square feet.

Cumulatively, all of this sign will cover three sides of 1 Times Square with a solitary animation. Never has a sale on pantyhose been so grossly over-promoted.

Oh, to be the guy/woman who bagged that deal …

How to get noticed in a shopping mall – Go BIG

Like many in this industry, I have at various times been involved in plans to put screens into big shopping malls.

I have seen looney-tune plans to install screens no bigger than 27″ and other ones that cascaded screens along corridors. A lot of people have thoughts around doing them at or near the wayfinding areas.

The problem is, malls are generally big yawning spaces and atriums or lower slung corridors with all kinds of stuff like temporary booths and trees in the way, usually leading to big yawning spaces. It is very hard to get noticed, unless you go really big.

Digital Signage Universe has a piece about a shopping mall in Kent, England that dealt with that by focusing all of the screens into one central wall. They tiled 16 panels in a 4 by 4 configuration, and used plasmas with high brightness and contrast and minimal bezels. What came out of the wash is a big-ass display that has the scale needed to get noticed, but the tight pixels and therefore image clarity that LED boards are not yet set-up to do.

When I first read the post’s kicker headline I interpreted it as meaning there are 16 of these around the mall, which would certainly have pop. It’s just a single, and you’d hope there would be multiples to get noticed and get more attention from media buyers.

However, the release suggests this wall of panels is for mall promos and messaging, not third-party ads.

If you have a challenging visual environment with no end of bright and shiny objects,  there will often be far greater benefit in taking the many screens intended to be scattered around a site and ganging them all together. Roughly the same cost, quite possibly less, but MUCH more impact.

Three-Minute Ad Age look at interactive LED boards

Advertising Age online does a regular video feature called 3-Minute Ad Age that does a quick blast through a selected topic.

There’s a piece up today about some cool interactive applications involving cell phones and the big, honkin’ aggregate of LED boards that Thomson Reuters has at NYC’s Times Square.

Among the campaigns are those for greeting card photos and one that allowed people to design their own custom Nike sneakers. One woman pretty much has a sidewalk orgasm after seeing her creation up in LED lights.

The things that tickle people …

Screen network as guinea pig recruiter

I am huge fan of anyone coming into this space who decides to go at it a little differently – and the newly announced Digi-AdServices Network certainly qualifies.

This is the well-mined approach of putting screens in waiting rooms because of the defined audience and long dwell times.

But the big difference is that the screens are there primarily as a way to recruit paid volunteers for clinical drug trials by well-heeled pharmaceutical companies.

The patient waiting room is the perfect captive audience, says a press release on the new network, announced Monday. Typically a patient waits for about 10-15 minutes before being called to the exam room. During that time they can view health related information on a large screen high definition monitor. Information on healthy lifestyles, new medications as well as current and future medical research can be displayed in a way never before possible. By using full color motion or still slides, the amount of information distributed is much much more than could ever be realized in traditional media. Intermixed with this information is a “call to action” by the sponsoring pharmaceutical company to have the viewer inquire at the investigative site about participating in a medical research study.

Dr. Bret A. Wittmer, a well known leader in the world of medical research and the founder of the Digi-AdServices Network says “Digital displays deliver quality, useful information that could improve everyday lives. The network also provides a vehicle for physicians and research centers to communicate the importance of volunteering for clinical research trials to those waiting to be seen by the doctor “.

By educating the public about the clinical research process in a way that is engaging and informative, a desire to participate is created. Digital signage is playing a huge part in how medical research and health information is being distributed. Research centers that are co-located with private practices are discovering that patients who have visited their physician for years were unaware that medical research was being conducted at the same location and that they could help in the advancements of new and improved medications.

In addition to general health information and patient recruitment there is an increase in interest by locally owned and national chain pharmacies to advertise on these monitors. By taking advantage of a captive audience in a doctor’s waiting room, the pharmacy is able to directly advertise to consumers who will more than likely “opt-in” to purchase their services or products.

I have heard incessant radio spots and seen ads in newspaper, so I know there is money out there for this sort of thing. And it must take some work to find people to close their eyes, cross their fingers and hope the pills they’re getting to swallow don’t give them unibrows or scales.

The press release header actually notes: Commonwealth Biomedical Research, LLC., a respected leader in the clinical trial research industry, announces the launch of a new division devoted to clinical trial subject recruitment content and information distribution via its digital signage network.

The company pays as much as $4,800 for people to be in the trials, which involves some sleepovers and undoubtedly lots of poking and prodding. Commonwealth appears to be tightly focused on deploying in just the surrounding area, presumably within reach of their labs.

So … interesting approach, and certainly one tapping into marketing dollars few people in this space gave a second thought about.

It’s also a pretty testy subject area, with one point of view that they are necessary to advance drug research and another that they are fraught with risks and prey on the disadvantaged. That’s a big subject, and not for this blog.

MSNBC’s Spectra news viewer a very different spin

I have been fiddling for a few days now with MSNBC’s Flash-based news viewer, which takes a dramatically different approach to visual presentation of news headlines.

Instead of news tickers or simple, stacked headlines, this is a color-coded tornado of Flash cards that swirl in a vortex on the screen.

Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum, says MSNBC’s NewsWare lab, into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.

It is eye candy, as has been noted elsewhere in coverage, and not all that practical in terms of page presentation. And it certainly makes no sense as an app on digital sign screens, except for monster LED boards.

What I like, and why I am even writing about this, is the out-of-the-box thinking behind visual presentation. These are really well-packaged headlines, and organized visually to help people view. I mostly think crawling news tickers are a waste of time and screen real estate on screen networks, in part because the audience doesn’t want them, but also because the presentation is terrible.

IF some variation on this sort of thing was done, with engaging visuals and easily digested  news nuggets, then maybe there’s something there.

MediaPost launches Digital Outsider

MediaPost editor Joe Mandese has been very active in reporting about the agency and corporate sidfe of this industry, and he and his bosses have stepped it up a bit this week by launching a new online piblication called Digital Outsider.

The first version is a single article explaining why he’s started this, and what to expect.

So I hope you’ll sample the early editions of the Digital Outsider and that you’ll decide to subscribe. The writers will change from week to week. So will the content – ranging from trends, marketplace analysis, profiles, interviews, and how-to type material. One thing that will remain consistent, is its focus: It will always be outside the box.

The Digital Outsider appears to be sponsored by my masters, though that’s not why I am telling you all this.