DarkGovernment

Billboards that Look at You

Smart Advertisements are watching you

No, it’s not a scene from the movie “Minority Report” where digital signboards served up personalized ads depending on who was passing by, but a real-life example at a Tokyo railway station. Above a flat-panel display hawking DVDs and books sits a small camera hooked up to some image processing software.

When trials begin in January the camera will scan travellers to see how many of them are taking note of the panel. It’s part of a technology test being run by NTT Communications.

“On many street corners and railway stations there are many digital signs,” said Tetsuya Kinebuchi, a senior research engineer at NTT’s Cyber Space Laboratories and developer of the system. “To automatically measure the effectiveness of the advertisements we can put a camera and PC nearby, and by using the image from the camera we can estimate how many people are looking at the monitor.”

Japanese cities are plastered with advertisements. From building-topping billboards to smaller ads around town, it seems like you’re never far away from a commercial message, and increasingly these are digital signboards. The effectiveness of delivering a message digitally is still not well understood but that could change with this technology.

The system has its limits. It doesn’t seek to identify individuals — NTT is worried about the negative implications of such a system — but it will attempt to figure out how many of the people standing in front of an advertisement are actually looking at it.

“It uses image detection software,” said Kinebuchi. “We gathered together many faces and came up with an average Japanese face, and by using pattern matching the system recognizes faces from the image.”

A second camera, which wasn’t fitted at the station but will be when tests begin in January, will take care of estimating how many people are in front of the ad, whether they are looking at it or not.

NTT is Japan’s largest telecommunications company and its interest in the system goes beyond the technology. The company has a content distribution system for digital signs and the work will help gather data that it could use to sell such a service and promote digital advertising in general.

Tags: advertisements, billboard, Cyber Space Laboratories, japan, minority report, NTT, Technology

British Intelligence Recruiting With Video Games

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the surveillance arm of the intelligence services, has become the first spy agency to embed advertisements for new recruits inside computer games.

The advertisements as depicted on the left, will appear as billboards in the fictional landscapes of games including Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent. They will not be written into the games themselves but will be fed into games when they are played on personal computers and Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles that are connected to the internet.

Double Agent, published by the Paris-based Ubisoft, stars Sam Fisher, an American spy who has “little time for polite niceties and even less for lies”. Fisher works for Third Echelon, a fictional hush-hush unit of the US National Security Agency, described as “an elite team of strategists, hackers, and field operatives”.

A spokesperson for GCHQ described the potential recruits that it wanted to reach as “computer-savvy, technologically able, quick thinking.

“We find increasingly we have to use less conventional means of attracting people . . . to go beyond glossy brochures and milk-round stalls.”

Industry figures suggest that the adverts will reach a mostly male audience, aged from 8 to 34. GCHQ hopes to “plant the idea in the heads of younger players” of pursuing a career in the secret services.

“We will monitor the results from this campaign and are ready to change our recruitment methods,” the spokeswoman said. “We know we can’t stand still.”

The move into video games demonstrates how the intelligence agencies have moved away from old-boy networks. This summer MI5 advertised for staff on the sides of London buses.

But adrenaline-addicted video games junkies should beware. GCHQ, which works in signal intelligence (hi-tech eavesdropping) and information assurance (protecting government information from hackers and other threats), is concentrating on recruiting software experts. Most will work from the agency’s main listening post, in Cheltenham, and will be nowhere near any James Bond-style exploits.

GCHQ was consulted on where its adverts would appear but the main decisions were made by its advertising agency, TMP Worldwide. Kate Clemens, head of GCHQ’s digital strategy at TMP, said: Online gaming allows GCHQ to target a captive audience . . . Gamers are loyal and receptive to innovative forms of advertising.”

GCHQ was characteristically reticent on the cost of the one-month campaign, but industry sources suggested it was comparable to that of a large recruitment advert in a Sunday broadsheet, which can run into the low tens of thousands of dollars.

Tags: 9-11 insider, advertisements, games, gchq, recruitment, video games