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Curated Advertising Is Coming To Highway Billboards (technologyreview.com)
Curated advertising may be coming to a highway near you. "A startup called Synaps Labs has brought it to the physical world by combining high-speed cameras set up a distance ahead of the billboard (about 180 meters) to capture images of cars," reports MIT Technology Review. "Its machine-learning system can recognize in those images the make and model of the cars an advertiser wants to target. A bidding system then selects the appropriate advertising to put on the billboard as that car passes." From the report: There is a lot an advertiser can tell about you from the car you drive, says Synaps. Indeed, recent research from a group of university researchers and led by Stanford found that -- using machine vision and deep learning -- analyzing the make, model, and year of vehicles visible in Google Street View could accurately estimate income, race, and education level of a neighborhood's residents, and even whether a city is likely to vote Democrat or Republican. Synaps's business model is to sell its services to the owners of digital billboards. Digital billboard advertising rotates, and more targeted advertising can rotate more often, allowing operators to sell more ads. According to Synaps, a targeted ad shown 8,500 times in one month will reach the same number of targeted drivers (approximately 22,000) as a typical ad shown 55,000 times. In Russia, Synaps expects to be operating on 20 to 50 billboards this year. The company is also planning a test in the U.S. this summer, where there are roughly 7,000 digital billboards, a number growing at 15 percent a year, according to the company. (By contrast, there are 370,000 conventional billboards.) With a row of digital billboards along a road, they could roll the ads as the cars move along, making billboard advertising more like the storytelling style of television and the Internet, says Synaps's cofounder Alex Pustov.
Somehow, adding "storytelling" by actively trying to distract drivers sounds like it's likely to decrease road safety.
See a billboard in the distance. As I get closer, it changes.
"YOU! DRIVING THE IMPALA! WE SEE YOU ENJOY HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY!"
Picture of me from facebook is displayed.
"PLEASE CONSIDER CHATURBATE THE NEXT TIME YOU SPANK IT!!"
The picture of a monkey being spanked by a large hand was overkill.
Thanks Advertising!
and software to "curate" your ads, why not go further and identify you by licence plate?
Tie your licence plate to your vehicle's onboard 3G/4G account, and via that to your social media (a fair assumption that you've been silly enough to use your social media gmail/hotmail address to activate your vehicle's 3G/4G access when you bought it, or even used that gmail/hotmail address as a recovery email if forced to use a 'customer@gm.com' address), and you've got access to a wealth of information.
And don't believe that {social media} wouldn't sell the contents of your profile to the highest bidder. Do any social media accounts ask for vehicle licence plate number?
Maybe it won't be long before social media start to ask you for your vehicle's account details "to serve you better", perhaps in the guise of "if you have an accident, we can notify your friends!"
Hell, that'd be a damn sight more accurate for curated ads than just the car make and model.
My next car will be pre-1980, european, manual, and two-seater. I will of course upgrade it if necessary with radial tyres, and decent brakes.
And replace all the poor-design or faulty components with something more modern - but it won't have a computer in it.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Call me stupid, but when there is lively traffic, the billboards are in full view of several cars at a time. So the update may be slow, so that e.g., ten or twenty cars see the same advertisement that is triggered by the first car? Or does every car get its own advertisement, so that you see a constantly flickering of different ads?
Paai
Pimple cream ads.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Keep the camera, I'm getting a 2000" TV!
Signed,
Frank.
#DeleteFacebook
Dear NRA,
Fuck you, I drive a Camry.
#DeleteFacebook
When the camera sees my car, the ads will be for Goodwill and Dollar stores. There might be promos for retirement homes or funeral services. Maybe a pretty girl will show on the billboard hawking Viagra. But most likely the policeman behind the billboard will pull me over to impound my tired old car.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Now I want to run my car past it made up to look like the batmobile, see what it does with THAT...
They will reckon that you are a nutjob, and they'd be right.
So I can't answer a phone call because it would cause me to be distracted, but big-business corp can distract the hell out of every driver on the road and that's OK because.... money?
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America