Face recognition and restricting 'consumers' (but what about Blade Runner?)
By André Casado – Psychology researcher
A few weeks ago, an NGO picked-up a face-recognition system based on technology to implant their advertising campaign on the streets of London. Their objective in using this technology was to restrict target audience. In this case they targeted specifically women. Despite any accusation of misoginy (too much, but it happened), this is what we have. Neil Chapman from Clear Channel, the media support, says in a hard-sales speech: "The technology is part of an overall solution which is the most advanced yet to be used in out-of-home advertising, incorporating a sophisticated multi-touch screen, wide angle HD camera and 3D depth sensor. It’s like a giant iPad crossed with an Xbox Kinect. Using the screen, brands can encourage consumers to view, browse, create, share and download HD content, connect to social media, interact via the touchscreen or gesture, and even star in the ads using augmented reality”. Actually, this is more about a simple system of face-recognition technology that can decode women from men - but not Jennifer from Jessica. It’s like most dayto-day interactions in human perceptions capacity. But as we know some researchers recently showed that in most day-to-day interactions, facialrecognition serves as a platform to process basic information and social interaction. Even with unfamiliar faces you can distinguish someone, categorize them by gender and get an average age estimate of that person, using only their facial features.
The best part is that these technologies are flying to the top baseline on facialrecognition systems. As the psychologist Paul Ekman developed the famous FACS - Facial Action Coding System - to recognize emotions through facial expressions on any individual from any culture, some researchers from Cambridge University are focused in implementing these skills on a computer. In a qualitative research perspective, this allows us to do a post-hoc analysis of people’s emotions about the product after collecting and comparing field responses of various consumers recorded by video. Consider it like a very important tool for homework, with several brands running similar experiences.
In one perspective, based in the post-hoc results you can retest the consumers, recreate questions, etc… and get deep study results about marketing. But in another perspective, imagine inquiring someone from the other side of the world in a video-call about something you have to show them, and obtaining much more real-time information than merely their words could transmit. Technology, qualitative research and people walk the same line. Unless when the issue is a Blade Runner-esque situation... then it's something to be understood in the future. The movie talks about 2019...
References: Erica H. (2012) Face-Recognizing Billboard Shows Ad to Women Only: TIME. Habibi R, Khurana B. (2012) Spontaneous Gender Categorization in Masking and Priming Studies: Key for Distinguishing Jane from John Doe but Not Madonna from Sinatra. Neil C. (2012) ‘Only girls allowed': Plan-uk website.
30/03/2012