New Ad Technology Tracks Consumer Movement

mingrassia writes "Over at CNN: New technology tracks consumer movement, flashes messages and calls out to passersby. Meet the Human Locator. It's a new technology developed by Canadian ad agency Freeset Interactive that purports to detect when humans are near, track their movement, and then broadcast messages directed at them on a nearby screen. Conspiracy theorists can relax, however. The Human Locator can't yet identify, say, obese pedestrians and then bombard them with images of a cheeseburger and fries."

Comments

Fried detetor

[penguinoid]

It's probably illegal, but does anyone know a way to (permanantly) disable a digital camera? Would a laser pointer do it? Not that I would do anything of the sort, of course.

Umm...

[Xshare]

So it's basically just a motion detector with some fancy bells and whistles (ie, can tell if you're walking away)? What's the big deal? It's not like it's gonna give try and market special ads to individual people, or that when you leave the vicinity of the ad fixture it even remembers you.

Re:Fine

[JanneM]

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Negative or not, they did get brand recognition. You may think that company X are rear orifices for advertising laundry detergent Y in this way, but at least you remember detergent Y.

Three weeks later, as you are standing in the aisle, choosing a detergent from the fivehundredmillion varieties dumped upon us, you will react emotionally to the sight of detergent Y. You do not have an emotional reaction (positive or negative) to the others. Of course, it been three weeks, so you don't actually remember why you have a reaction. The negativity was most likely attached to the company, not the brand, and since you don't really recall the connection to the company, the negative attributions are mostly gone. All you remember is that you have emotions for detergent Y and not for the others.

Guess what? You are more likely to buy it.