Targeted ads aren’t new and are now one of the more popular ways to advertise to customers. After all isn’t it better to display ads that they think you might be interested in based on your search results and likes, as opposed to displaying ads that are completely irrelevant to you and your needs?Turns out that targeted ads could soon be transitioning to real-life because over in Moscow, it seems that a startup called Synaps Labs has been testing out targeted ads on billboards that target drivers based on the cars that they drive. An example given by the MIT Technology Review was how drivers of a BMW x5 or Volvo XC60 might see an ad from Jaguar advertising its latest SUV.
This is made possible by combining high-speed cameras that can capture images of cars and through machine-learning, it will be able to recognize the make and model of the car to know which ad it should display. A bidding system is then used to select the appropriate ad to put on the screen of the billboard as the car passes.
This concept isn’t new and we’ve seen it employed in movies in the past, such as Minority Report whose technology seems to become more real with each passing day. It is also rather clever, although admittedly rather creepy and to a certain extent it almost feels like your privacy is being invaded.
While it might not necessarily be great for drivers or consumers, it is great for advertisers because according to Synaps, they claim that a targeted ad shown 8,500 times a month can reach the same number of drivers as a typical ad that would be shown 55,000 times, making it a more efficient way of advertising. As Synaps’s cofounder Aleksey Utkin puts it, “It’s just like an offline cookie.”
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