Technology advancements are making headlines especially in the mobile phone sector as each manufacturer is trying to out compete the other. Billboards and banners are also shifting from still pictures to moving pictures in major cities. The most surprising twist in advertising, is the ability of billboards being able to read emotions.
Advertising giant M&C Saatchi is currently testing advertising billboards with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read emotions and react according to whether a person’s facial expression is happy, sad or neutral. The company is currently doing test adverts with a coffee brand called Bahio. That sounds amazing if you ask for my opinion because I am still trying to understand how an advert can read viewer’s reactions and adapt accordingly, cycling through different images, designs, fonts and colors.
2015 is a landmark year because of the great achievements made by the advertising giant Saatchi. Three key things that are still loading in my brain: adverts can read our behavior, this is based on our emotions rather than website browsing history, and that adverts use this to improve themselves.
IFLScience reports that the campaign represents an attempt to get closer to viewers, something that’s a defining characteristic of the advertising and audience research industries. They want to know viewers more intimately so as to be able to craft messages that will affect and resonate with them. This is the kind of media that can even start a conversation and persuade viewers to buy the services or products being advertised.
The adverts will not breach our right to privacy as compared to smartphones and PCs. The company stipulates that they do not store images or data. Daniel Starch and Claude Hopkins insisted that advertising should be treated as a science based on collecting information, analysing it and using these insights to improve campaigns. Starch and Hopkins both sought to understand which techniques do and don’t work in order to make the business of advertising subject to laws of cause and effect.
The evolved advertising billboards are dubbed artificially intelligent champagne. The champagne is to help advertisers understand why their viewers smile, laugh or even cry when they come across their adverts. This kind of advertising will probably brush shoulders with different human rights activists. The adverts will be able to read people’s evil thoughts and moods. Who wants his or her thoughts exposed to someone operating an intelligent advert?
Artificial intelligence has been adopted by many tech companies to make their devices efficient. Recently Facebook introduced the Moments App that can scan images for faces then match them to your Facebook friends. This is proof that artificial intelligence will one day run the world.
