Big Billboard Is Watching You…

                               

    Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?  Well, if you are looking at a billboard in Great Britain, that just might be the case.  Roel Vertegaal has a recent invention called the EyeBox2, which he developed through the company Xuuk, Inc.  This new form of technology serves as a new option for advertisers as they try to determine what billboards, shelves, and plasma TVs are getting the most attention from unsuspecting onlookers. 

    Vertegaal says that the concept of the EyeBox2 is similar to the process used in photo editing software.  You know how it goes…You make some pictures of your friends using the flash on your camera and they turn out absolutely perfect…except for those awful red eyes.  You’re forced to go in and edit them out.  The EyeBox2 actually looks for that red eye and allows adverstisers to use it to find out if people are interested in their ads.  There have been several other eye-tracking systems up to this point, but none of them have been nearly as effective.  Many of these devices were only able to track the eyes of a person no more than a half a meter away.  However, this latest system has increased that distance up to 20 times, which means that it can find out if you are looking at an ad up to 10 meters away. 

    For now, this advertising practice is just being used across the pond, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it showed up in the United States sometime soon.  While some might consider these eye-tracking billboards to be a little bizarre, I think that they really don’t seem that different from some of the procedures that advertisers are currently using online.  The author of the article says that EyeBox2 “…is like Google Analytics for the offline world.”  Google Analytics is already helping advertisers measure the success of their ads and product placements, so eye-tracking billboards should really come as no surprise.  The question is: How far will this go?  I’ve never seen the movie Minority Report, but I’ve heard that it contains a futuristic concept in which individuals have hologram-like ads that are personalized specifically for them.  I’m not saying that the EyeBox2 is that advanced, but you have to admit it seems like a step in that direction.  It’s definitely something to think about…

    The price for each unit is $999, which I don’t think seems too bad.  If advertisers are really able to use this to identify what types of ads capture attention, it seems like they could easily make up the cost of a few units in key areas of the country.  However, if companies find this to be a little more than they are willing to pay, they can always go with something a little more low-tech by following in the footsteps of a Dutch online reservations company called Hotels.nl.  The cost per…uh…”unit” is only 1 euro or about $1.23 a day (plus the fines for violating bans on advertising along highways in some areas of the Netherlands).  It’s certainly attention-grabbing, so long as advertisers don’t feel too “sheepish” about using the method.  (I know, I know…Please spare me your groans.)

                                  

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