By EMILY STEEL
In the labs of some tech-savvy advertising agencies, engineers are testing new ways to use advanced technologies to make ads that can recognize human gestures and facial expressions.
Marketers envision billboards that could tell if a passerby is paying attention, and whether that person is male or female, then alter its images and message accordingly. Other goals include interactive television commercials that viewers could control with a wave of the hand via a sensor connected to their TV sets, or targeted TV spots geared to the age and gender of the viewer.
The technology “actually recognizes faces. If you raise your eyebrow, it can track that,” says Jonathan Nelson, chief executive at Omnicom Digital, a unit of Omnicom Group Inc., New York. “We’re exploring the applications, and they are endless.”
Gesture- and facial-recognition technologies have been in development for years, especially for security purposes, and more recently for video gaming, but prices have dropped sharply in the past few years, encouraging the ad industry to experiment. The new systems can detect and interpret motions as subtle as nodding or frowning. Some facial-recognition technologies can even identify individuals, one of the reasons the industry’s progress in the field is likely to raise privacy concerns.
“What we are trying to do is figure out what your brain is doing,” says Benjamin Palmer, CEO of Barbarian Group, an interactive-ad agency owned by Cheil Worldwide Inc. “If your eyes are the window into the soul, we’re paying attention to what you are paying attention to.”
via Ad Firms Experiment With Recognition Technologies – WSJ.com.
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