NEC showcases consumer ad engagement technology

Rating: Mixes M2M comms with advertising world

You might think it impossible to put M2M (Machine-2-Machine) communications and advertising together in the same sentence, but here at the Mobile WorldCongress 2012, Japan’s NEC has managed it very easily. GoMobile News has been chatting with Gareth Price, head of new business strategy with NEC Europe. He explained how NEC has the ability to capture the kind of consumer engagement level data that most major brands/advertisers would kill for. Better still, Price revealed that this technology is here now and has even been rolled out in a genuine retail environment in Korea.

What NEC has basically done is install camera right next to electronic billboards which employ face recognition to gather data for the gender and estimated age for those who take interest or ignore the displayed adverts.

The cameras effectively employ M2M connexions to send back information via the cloud which can be turned into Big Data for real-time analytics.

For example, the cameras can gather data on how many visitors in a mall, pause; stop; turn their heads or walk right passed a digitally displayed advert.

If there was an element of interaction with a mobile phone, the cameras could – for example, record how many people come forward to scan a QR code or touch their NFC enabled handsets against an embedded RF chip.

This kind of information could be employed by advertisers to show a female orientated version of an advert as young Mums walk passed with their children at 3 pm and a more male orientated version of the same ad at 6 pm when Dads walk passed on their way home.

It would even enable the billboards’ owners to differentiate their charges for the times at which adverts are displayed – much like TV.

Alongside this technology, was NEC showing a kind of augmented reality (AR) on steroids. It’s Japanese name is apparently Zaziru but it is also described as advanced or enhanced advertising.

What Zaziru can do is recognise not only still images or objects (like AR) but also moving pictures – such as a TV ad. NEC show showing how this worked with an advert for beer created by Suntory.

It also calims that the technology has already been deployed by the Japanes store company, Hakuhodo.