Clear Channel’s billboards will start tracking consumers in Europe
theverge.com
theverge.com
This kind of physical, outdoor advertising has been hemorrhaging dollars to online ads for decades for several reasons but a big one is online having a much better (but far from perfect) attribution story. Attribution is the big, thorny problem in _all_ of advertising e.g. how do you know if Customer A saw Ad B and that they then went on to buy Product C.
In my experience this type of tech has two goals:
The first is measuring distribution with aggregate data about how many people saw the ad and when, then combining this with ethnographic data about the location (e.g. what proportion of people in this area fall into income bracket Y). This looks like "1,293 people have seen your ad in the last 60 minutes and here some demographic information about them". This is done with video and gait tracking, or radar/lidar for measuring volumes and people who 'engage' with the ad by lookijng at it for >N $TIME.
This is all perfectly possible and scalable and is what ClearChannel are currently doing, the product trick is to make it 'real-time' so advertisers can adjust their buys and unit distribution more flexibly when combined with digital signage (e.g. I'm going to move our ad from this unit in this location to this other unit in this other location in 'real-time' as there's more high net worth people there today). This also nicely ups outdoor spend (people use it more, it appears more sticky) but they also charge more for these more 'dynamic' outdoor units. There's a bunch of seriously dubious data the the publishers use to justify this new way of buying outdoor.
The second (and WAY worse one) is doing direct attribution (e.g. Did consumer sKIFW3890 see ad sdoflij0934r and then did they buy product 029w3r29 from merchant 203ei2-309ir). This has been the holy grail of outdoor for a decade but no one's been able to make it work. ClearChannel very clearly WANT to do it, which is creepy as all hell, but in my reading between the lines (and working in the industry a little) I don't _think_ this is what their Radar solution delivers, at the moment. I could be wrong, though.
That's not the goal. The goal is to turn outdoor billboards into online ad bars. The goal is to micro-target whales, those with lots to spend and who are most susceptible to ads. When such an individual walks down a street they will see billboards targeting them specifically. Everyone will know when the latest tech millionaire steps of the BART. All the billboards will switch from Honda to Bugatii.
Personally, I'm not wealthy. But when I drive down the road I don't want to see the same stupid ads I see online. (At work. At home I use adblockers and never see ads.) None of the ads are relevant to me in any way. I am not looking for a retirement home, nor am I having trouble with my colon. And I definitely do not want to see incontinence products on every billboard.
Because of that, again right now, it's a misnomer that outdoor want to do the Bladerunner style microtargeting of large outdoor display (the Bugatti example you gave) simply because you make MUCH less money showing an ad to 100's of people to target one person than showing a _better_ ad to the 100's. This is because the outdoor market is still fundamentally based on CPM not CPA; that _might_ change, but in my experience it's not likely.
But I wouldn't limit it to the wealthy. Advertisers know that at particular points in life everyone become susceptible to ads. The young couple who just discovered they are pregnant: big spending on new products asap. The junior executive who just got a big promotion: new car time. The soldier who just got leave: hotels. The guy who just inherited a house from a dead relative: estate agents. I think most advertisers would forgo the attention of the regular commuters if they can target the one individual on the train who is primed to react to a specific type of ad.
My nightmare is the rise of so-called anti-ads, individually-targeted ads so horrible that users will pay to make them not appear. There are ads on television that cause people to change the channel. (The crying puppy ads, the borderline-obscene erectile dysfunction stuff.) Now imagine you cannot escape. That ad follows you around all day. How bad must it become before you will pay to make it stop? Bladerunner wasn't that bad.
Is this a trend you are seeing in digital out of home? AFAIK, no one is working on doing this. Just some back of envelope math tells me it would be very expensive to target the "1%" this way and it will still probably pay less than the average CPG would pay if you had attribution. Likewise Luxury brands still want to advertise across the socioeconmic gamut, not just the wealthy - the ones that don't (like a McLaren) don't advertise at all, or in only hyper niche areas.
Attribution is the "holy grail" as it gives CPGs an extremely clear ROI for ad spend, that's why they want better data.
If so, another fantastic example of expensive and complex regulation being gamed by the big players while the smaller entities are left with the cost.
It was essentially tracking everyone who passed it by characteristics like gender, if they had glasses, where they were looking.
But yeah, every person was just an entry. There was no way for it to know who that person was.
I wish I could find the story but my google-fu isn't helping.
Such a billboard in a small town up north in Norway could easily identify the individuals based on those characteristics since the population is so low.
People's privacy usually isn't impacted until datasets are combined, compromising pseudonimity.
However, for any smaller player wishing to compete on the advertising side the cost of entry is now humongous because of intense up-front cost to setup capability that is in compliance.
Et voila, corporations win in the end.
So what you're really saying is that a detailed dataset is more valuable, and shouldn't be considered anonymized. Or, more succinctly, "anonymized" should not be boolean, but is a quantitative property of the dataset.
Sex == 1 bit. Hair color =~ 2 bits. Glasses/no glasses =~ 0.6 bits. Phone number == 33 bits. Location to 1km precision would be many more bits in a rural area (less people / lower density) than in a big city. And so on.
This would take care of the metadata. It would also put the companies on the defensive - if _the company_ thinks they're collecting just 20bits of data, but if I can do some fancy ML on their data (require regular external audits of collected data if more than say 10k people were tracked) and retrieve 27bits, that would put them in breach (& massive penalties).
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... Chapter 1 Article 4, definition of personal data
[...] an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly [...] or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
If I read this correct, if you can be identified by a tuple (sex,hair color, classes, more attributes), the GDPR applies, even if they have no name etc... Hence, even an anonymized ID is still identification for the GDPR.
We can't trust advertisers to limit themselves. They are only limited by what current technology can achieve but the goal posts keep moving and so is their appetite for more intrusive ways to gather data.
There is a strong competitive incentive for them to build a system capable of proving that a specific consumer seeing a specific ad ended up in a specific sale. Imagine how much value that information could have to a company wanting to sell its products! Near-guaranteed sales, ad expenses laser-targetted to those who will actually buy! A boon for both advertisers and sellers!
Advertisers gather and cross-reference public information, credit information, track people tastes, political affiliations, phone location, where they go, what they look at... all to present consumers with hyper targeted adverts that result in more sales. The more detailed and precise the data, the more targeted the ad and the higher the chances of persuading a customer to part with their money. Removing uncertainty is the goal.
I sincerely hope that these overreaching applications of what is basically surveillance tech meet stronger resistance. Legal challenges are best, but some old-fashioned 'guerilla' tactics may also be effective... I wouldn't be sorry for companies like Clear Channel either way.
That's obviously something I would want to "adblock".
I can't wait to have their names, I certainly will change provider if mine has anything to do with that.
From what I read in the Belgian post where I got this info, to be conform to GDPR, they will only track with opt-in.
The trick is that opt-in will be in partners apps you will install on your phone.
So, basically, your phone.
From what I read in the Belgian post where I got this info, to be conform to GDPR, they will only track with opt-in.
The trick is that opt-in will be in partners apps you will install on your phone.
So, basically, your phone.
The trick is that opt-in will be in partners apps you will install on your phone.
"L'entreprise insiste cependant sur le fait que les consommateurs doivent donner leur autorisation pour permettre à Radar d'utiliser leurs données de géo-localisation. Cela se fait en général via les conditions générales de certaines applis." which roughly translate as
"The company insists on the fact that consumers have to give their authorization to allow Radar to use geoloc datas. It will be done via CLUF of some apps"
[0] https://datanews.levif.be/ict/actualite/les-panneaux-publici...
Again, not a lawyer, but that’s how I interpret it. And there’s a good chance they have good ones to prevent mistakes.
The GDPR specifies six ways you can legally process personal data. Consent is one of them. It must be explicit for each usage, in plain language, opt-in, and non-coerced. Non-coerced means you can’t require consent as a condition of access.
So, no, consent buried in a 40-page T&C would not count.
Maybe missing details
“Remember that scene from Minority Report where Tom Cruise is on the lam, but the billboards know what he likes?
[Embedded YouTube video: Minority Report - Personal Advertising in the Future]
We’re not quite there yet; the Radar-enabled billboards aren’t making spoken sales pitches directly to customers. […]”
That was supposed to be a dystopia, not an instruction.