Billboards Uses Facial Recognition Coming to Prague

Manchester-based OOH adtech company Bidooh recently announced that it will deploy 3,000 smart ad boards across Eastern, Central, Europe and the Balkans. The Financial Times likened its propriety “facial recognition” tech to that in the film ‘Minority Report’ – but Bidooh’s boss has played down this comparison.

Over the next three years, Bidooh will amass over 2,000 screens across the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovakia; a further 1,000 will launch in Romania. These will be placed in areas of high footfall, like shopping centers, malls, cinemas, theme park, offices, parks, petrol stations, and airports.

The initiative will see these digital billboards fitted with cameras, which will scan the faces of people in its proximity. The tech will “give brands, advertisers and mall owners a deeper understanding of the visitor demographics,” said Abdul Alim, Bidooh chief executive and co-founder.

It will collect information about visitors including gender, age, emotion, facial hair, and the use of sunglasses or glasses from a range from five to 15 meters. With this data, it can identify marketing segments and deliver relevant ads to them in real-time.

With concerns over consumer privacy heightened in wake of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and several high-profile data breaches, Alim was quick to stress that the company is GDPR compliant and that automatically anonymises any data it gathers.

The belief is that the system will increase the effectiveness of ads.

Author: red