Let’s talk innovation.
A big part of Global Entrepreneurship Week is celebrating innovation. The whole concept of innovation is great. Its about re-imagining, birthing anew and changing the face of things around you. So its really cool to see innovation the size of a billboard, or wait, on a billboard, no there it is below the billboard.
Apparently, billboards are now collecting data about the people who passby. “Some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem.
They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that
a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person
standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.”
Facebook and many other online ads already identify and market to us in thi
s way. So rather than show people a bunch of stuff they have zero interest in, we will now be inundated with ads for things we should be interested in. At first, I was bothered by this but now I appreciate it. I want to know about stuff I think is cool and I don’t really mind if you stereotype me to figure out what I think.
So here, we find innovation at play in another field where the concept of the entrepreneurship is not synonymous. I like that. Its innovative in the field and innovative in the way that we see the field. What more could you ask for?
Tags: advertising, billboard, entrepreneurship, Global Entrepreneurship Week, stereotype
