Venco Electronica, an electronics solution provider with more than 25 years in the Spanish industrial electronic market, has announced the integration of TruMedia’s iCapture audience measurement solution into its digital signage screens.

Venco’s DS for Digital Screens division produces turnkey DS solutions, including HD resolution screens, platform, audience measurement, and communications. Venco screens are the first to include a fully integrated audience measurement solution with built in iCapture Camera and SmartBox. Embedded screens are available as 46- and 52-inch hi-definition LCD screens as well as 46-, 52- and 65-inch totems.

“We believe that the success of digital signage hinges on the ability to accurately measure ROI and effectively target advertising to the viewing audience,” said Joan Clotet, managing director, Venco. “Venco prides itself in offering cutting edge DS technology and integrating TruMedia’s iCapture audience measurement solution into our screens was a natural progression.”

“We are pleased to see our solution integrated into Venco’s screens and believe that we will continue to see our solution become an integral part of Digital Signage solutions.” Said Jerry Henzen, TruMedia’s vice president of international sales & marketing.

Like all TruMedia products, iCapture is fully respectful of the audience’s privacy: no images are ever recorded, and no uniquely identifiable data is extracted.

Venco will be demonstrating the company’s new integrated screens at shows all over Europe this coming September including – Spanish Malls Association Congress and Exhibition (17 September), TOTAL MEDIA - first Digital Signage Fair (25-26 Sept), VISCOM SIGN POP and POS (16-18 Oct), MATELEC Electronics and Integrated components (28 Oct-1 Nov)

From the AudienceCount Blog

http://www.audiencecount.com/audience-measurement/nec-digital-signage-ad-targeting-screen/

I ran into this article at The Times Of India webpage and was surprised to see that my long time notion about large companies was correct; these big name companies are working behind the scenes in building their own measurement / targeting tools.

The article talks about how big name NEC has created a technology, which through the use of a camera placed on top of a large Plasma/LCD display can identify the number of males/females and age ranges of the audience. After identifying the audience, the system then automatically targets them with suitable advertisements. NEC Corp said that this new form of targeted advertisements will be featured at an annual festival in Tokyo by Fuji Television network. The festival will run till August 31 and Fuji hopes to draw more than 4 million visitors to beat last year’s record.

When the system identifies the age ranges and gender of the viewers standing in front of the digital screens, the system will tally which of the audience demographics is the largest and will dynamically target ads to them,

For young women in their 20’s it may show ads for the latest iPhone, and women in their 40’s it may show Prada handbags.

“Conventional advertisements may show cell phones for young women to men over 60,” said Hiroshi Takahashi at NEC’s solution business promotion division.

“Changing advertising products in accordance with the viewer would bring advertising closer to the purchaser,” he said.

But the system is seen as having growth potential as companies struggle to win the attention of customers who are increasingly bombarded by advertisements throughout the day.

The underlying technology behind this or any other form of digital signage ad targeting system has to be an audience measurement system; whether it’s a proprietary technology from NEC or a third party technology solution licensed by: Quividi, CognoVision, TruMedia, VideoMining, Xuuk, or Wututu. The main purpose for using these technologies is that there needs to be some face detection in order to process audience demographics in real-time and the only technologies that currently perform these are audience measurement tools. There are obvious alternative applications for these customer centric measurement tools. I’ve read in articles, whitepapers, and blogs that the sales cycle for digital signage deployments is long and for audience measurement probably a lot longer. In the meantime I’d like to see more audience measurement technologies powering large digital signage ad targeting networks, if the sales cycle for audience measurement deployments is long, why not try another channel of distribution.

Please share your comments, ideas, or thoughts on this article.

NEC Corp is counting on a new digital signage system that determines the age and sex as well as other “attributes” of the people standing in front of the scree. The system uses facial recognition software and sends a gender and age appropriate advertisement to the screen.

Tech-On reports:

“Participants stand in front of the display and hold a FeliCa-based mobile phone over the reader/writer. The system determines the user’s gender and generation through the camera image using the face recognition technology.

The display shows advertisements that would suit the user’s gender and generation, choosing from the 15 candidates prepared in advance. An electronic coupon that would match the attributes is sent to the user’s mobile phone at the same time.”

It will be interesting to see how this type of digital ad presentation evolves and how those who are concerned with privacy issues will react. Although this isn’t an invasion of privacy considering the signs are in public domain, there are those that feel this is a “surveillance system”.

Personally I would rather see an advertisement that is geared to me a 48 year old male than one directed to my 8 year old daughter.

The title of this post says it all: digital signage (and other out-of-home media) networks must guarantee viewer privacy, unequivocally and without exception. This needs to happen automatically, without requiring consumers to opt-out of anything. The fact that the matter is even up for debate right now is astonishing to me. Granted, I’m a bit of a personal privacy zealot. But it’s still hard to imagine that there are legions of consumers who are perfectly at home with the idea of constant surveillance by practically anybody that has the wherewithal to install a camera or two. However, a lot of people have been talking about the “expectation of privacy” lately, which fits nicely into our ongoing discussion about the merits and dangers of in-store media measurement.

Read more here: http://www.wirespring.com/dynamic_digital_signage_and_interactive_kiosks_journal/articles/Digital_signage_networks_must_guarantee_viewer_privacy-569.html