SignageWire

You know Bill's position on privacy for digital signage viewers, but even so it's amazing to see such powerful features as gender recognition coming from more and more solution providers, as this press release indicates:

Most off-the-shelf digital signage systems that intend to use viewer validation tools have to undergo an integration process. This involves the overcoming of hardware and software compatibility issues, the fine-tuning of validation-to-player synchronization problems and the coordination of log report functions. These issues often have the potential to drag installation deadlines and result in increased costs.

By mounting a regular webcam on the screen, the media player’s InterFace™ viewer validation software can detect onlookers, differentiate gender and immediately react by swapping to more relevant content if instructed to. Otherwise it can continue playing its scheduled programming.

Gender distinction also expands the categorization of InterFace™’s validation logs to detect and count viewers, measure attention span and ‘Opportunity to See’ foot traffic count at the point of display - all of which can be translated to spreadsheets for convenient analysis.

Our take:

While it's true that integration costs probably have stalled some projects, our research has suggested that the high price of the solutions coming from vendors like TruMedia and the like probably have more to do with it. After all, we can't even agree that tracking users is useful and valuable, let alone agree on what that "value" should be. Consequently, network owners and advertisers alike have shied away from 6- and 7-figure experiments to try and figure it all out.