At Immersive Labs, Ads Watch Who Looks At Them (VIDEO)

Huffington Post
April 27, 2011

Next time you look at a billboard, it might be looking back. It'll know your age, gender and how long you've been staring at it.

Targeted advertising is the golden goose of the online economy: ads keyed to a user's unique interests have been shown to double the effectiveness of traditional ads. But those ads have been restricted to the Internet--until now.

New York City startup Immersive Labs's outdoor ads use artificial intelligence to target the individuals or groups looking at them. Our video of Immersive Lab's ads below shows how they increase engagement and bring the Web's interactivity and customization out into the real world.

The facial recognition software can determine the gender and age of whoever is walking by, and, if there's more than one person looking, can detect the makeup of the crowd. That's nothing new. Billboards have been able to identify these characteristics for years. But unlike past technology, Immersive uses this information to deliver the ad with the best calculated chance of getting your attention at that moment. Alongside the consumer's information, the software customizes ads by pulling in local data including the weather and social media updates from sites like Twitter.

So if a fifty-year-old man strolls by an ad for tampons, the ad will morph seamlessly into an ad for running shoes before he gets there. If a crowd of men and women of all ages come by on a cold morning, the display might transform into an ad for hot coffee: a gender-neutral, time and weather appropriate solution. And if hundreds of people are tweeting about the Knicks game, the software might realize a sports game is unfolding nearby, and display a nicely appropriate Gatorade ad.

Read the entire article