Your Kid’s Apps Are Crammed With Ads

VIA: NY Times

Many developers market apps for children as being educational. So Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician who wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for children and media, wanted to check that out. More [HERE]

Tech Companies Want to Run Our Cities

VIA: Medium

In Rio de Janeiro, a NASA-style control center aggregates data from hundreds of surveillance cameras and sensors built into the city since it partnered with IBM in 2010. In Phoenix, Arizona, Google spin-off Waymo is shuttling workers around in self-driving cars in partnership with the city’s transit network. And in the Chinese city of Xiangyang, advanced facial recognition technology from one of the country’s many surveillance startups gives residents entry to a housing complex while adding to a police database. More [HERE]

Piccadilly Circus billboard uses recognition technology to deliver targeted adverts

We already knew this was happening but a reminder is always a good idea.

VIA: Dezeen

A new digital billboard in London's Piccadilly Circus uses recognition technology to display targeted advertisements based on the make of passing cars, and the gender and age of pedestrians. More [HERE]

Smart cities are boring. Give us responsive cities.

It is Tuesday morning in Brussels and I am starting the install of my show at Harlan Levey Projects today. Before I get going on that I read an interesting article sent to me and written by the CTO of a large outdoor advertising and digital infrastructure firm. I have been pitching them a very public use of the infrastructure that he created in the hopes of creating a truly democratic open platform on an outdoor advertising network. I know, I know. Working with the enemy. In some ways yes, and in some ways trying out new ideas that would create the language needed to demand an ad free space that would be required of an open public visual environment. I'll keep you posted and be open with my endeavors cause honesty is the best policy and I am a sucker for criticism, be it my own, or someone else's.

My work has increasingly begun to happen in the digital space, or at least the thinking I am forced to do as digital advertising and the ramifications of digital infrastructure make thier way through the outdoor advertising world. Beyond hacking a digital kiosk, how does one deal with this new infrastructure as an activist? Is there some aspect of digital infrastructure that might provide the kinds of opportunities I seek to replace outdoor advertising? Can digital infrastructure be a shared civic resource in a way that the old billboard could not? I think so, although getting the companies who own these public infrastructures to share them as if they were truly public is a big ask, there are opportunities to do just that around the corner. My interest is ultimately in breaking the stranglehold on public space communication that advertising has tightened over the years so that a renewed democratic civic discourse can take its place and there is something uniquely democratic about a digital screen that can alternate content and provide larger populations with a voice where traditional print media could not.

VIA: Tech Crunch

As an urban technologist, I’m often asked to give an example of a compelling smart city application that real people are using. But to be honest, there really isn’t too much to point to – yet. Cities may be getting smarter, but they haven’t noticeably changed from a user perspective. More [HERE]

Augmented reality and artistic experience(s)

It is 2017 so lets talk about the future by talking about our past work.  NO AD: NYC from Heavy on Vimeo. “Augmented reality and artistic experience(s)”: the choice of title is not down to chance. In effect, if there is one area that indeed proposes to “augment” the artistic experience, both in its creative process – the production - but also in our experience, apprehension and discovery of art, it is virtual reality and its associated technologies, mixed reality and augmented reality. Perhaps even more than its contemporary virtual reality – that has benefitted for two years from disproportionate prominence –augmented reality or AR, appears capable to us, on a daily basis, and very simply (AR only requires a smartphone or a tablet) of transforming both creativity AND artistic experiences. Through detailed examination, Digitalarti will aim to provide support for this theory, but also to offer examples of what is being done, attempting to highlight the pertinence and the originality of the proposed approaches. In short, we will present a panorama of art in augmented reality. More [HERE]

See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

Sellers of advertising space love to know who will be looking thier ad spaces so that they can allow companies to target more and more specific audiences. Online, this type of aggregate tracking is easy, but OOH advertisers have been hard pressed to create hyper accurate demographic studies linked to particular public spaces. Until now, anything more than a guess required someone onsite to tally information like gender, age, race, and whatever other important insight can be gleaned from ones appearance. It seems Clear Channel has solved this problem by getting cell phone companies, and nefarious mobile app producers whose apps gather geo location content, to allow them to link thier advertising sites to very specific consumer profiles and patterns of movement around the city. Want to target 20-30 year old males who shop at Abercrombie & Fitch... No problem. They are found concentrated on the 405 between 830am and 10am as evidenced by hard data reported through AT&T. Looking for 35-45 year old single mothers of 2 or more children? They are highly likely to be visiting super markets and shopping centers between 630pm and 8pm Monday through Friday. 

The collusion between advertisers and corporations here is scary in that they are taking one step closer to be being in total and complete synchronicity. Each product, now finding the space in our city where it is most likely to be received by its intended audience and thus purchased. In the process, our conception of our consumer identity will be reinforced making its grip that much harder to resist. 

VIA: The NY Times

Pass a billboard while driving in the next few months, and there is a good chance the company that owns it will know you were there and what you did afterward. More [HERE]

New Yorkers to soon get ‘super-fast,’ free public Wi-Fi throughout the city

Link NYC is rolling out as we speak and bringing super fast WiFi, plus free calls and phone charging, along with other bells and whistles to NYC in 2016. The new units will replace the old phone booth infrastructure that has become so outdated over the past 5-10 years, bringing a refreshed look to the streets along with all of that high tech. I must say I am quite excited to see these units up and running in the same way people must have been excited to see phones being placed on the street, whenever that was. Unlike the phone booths in NYC, running these digital kiosks will not be free and to offset the cost of installation and upkeep, LinkNYC will be running digital video and still ads. There is talk of renewed OOH business models which will make the advertising more local, allow smaller businesses to participate and generally make these kiosks less obtrusive than thier older counterparts, but I remain skeptical. Only time will tell. 

VIA: Metro NYC

One New York company is hoping to link the city that never sleeps to a level of connectivity never done before — and all for free. More [HERE]

The Age of Drone Vandalism Begins With an Epic NYC Tag

While I wouldn't say this is a particularly well achieved culture jam, or ad takeover, Katsu has proven that even those sky high billboards, so entirely off limits, are vulnerable. Excited to see what he is up to next. 

VIA: Wired

IN THE EARLY hours of Wednesday morning, the age of robotic graffiti was born. KATSU, a well-known graffiti artist and vandal, used a hacked Phantom drone to paint a giant red scribble across Kendall Jenner’s face on one of New York City’s largest and most viewed billboards. By all accounts, it is the first time that a drone has been deployed for a major act of public vandalism. More [HERE]

Add-Art 2.0 Is Available Now!

Steve Lambert has continued to be an inspiration for me over the years in large part because he has been able to so seamlessly work in a multitude of media. Add-Art is a Firefox Plugin he and a few others developed a while back that removes browser ads and replaces them with curated art content. The plugin just got a reboot that you can download [HERE] or simply visit add-art.org for more information. With the update comes a slightly different, and more participatory format. Image databases are downloadable from curators like Rhizome, PublicAdCampaign, and NASA, but anyone can submit an image set themselves. If approved, that new image set is made available online just like the curated sets. I think it's a wonderful update to the original Add-Art and hope PublicAdCampaign users will not only use the Plugin, but also submit thier own imagery for consideration.

How Pay-Per-Gaze Advertising Could Work With Google Glass

I have a friend who studied seccadic eye movement at CUNY and now works for the NIH doing research mapping visual attention and the brain. A while back we were talking about a familiar response from media savvy citizens to the simple question, "How do you feel about outdoor advertising?" Many of them answer that they simply don't look at advertising, suggesting that the question is irrelevant or has no bearing on them, presumably because they know not to look at ads and can exercise that choice at will. 

Quit simply, your eye is looking at a lot more than you are aware or conscious of but that is processed and used to make complex decisions. While citizens may feel like they arent looking at ads, chances are they are processing a great deal of messages, if not simply the larger consumption message that is imposed by the plethora of outdoor media. We thought it would be a good idea to fashion a portable version of the eye tracking software and hardware used in his lab in order to prove that despite your best efforts, you're still paying attention. 

I looks like Google beat us to the punch. 

Google wants to see what you see. And then, of course, make money from those images.
The company was recently awarded a patent that puts forth an idea for pay-per-gaze advertising — a way in which people interacting with ads in the real world could be analyzed in the digital world. More [HERE]

Cleveland Indians want to put ads where fans can see them

VIA Engadget

Advertisers and sponsors are extremely valuable to all professional sports teams, and thus it is very important to keep them engaged with the fans. In an effort to make this happen, the Cleveland Indians recently partnered with Tobii, a maker of eye-tracking glasses, to conduct a study that could determine what exactly folks look at throughout their time at Progressive Field. The MLB team says it gave 47 fans a pair of Tobii Glasses to use during the span of three days, which were worn as they watched games from various seating areas at its ballpark. Essentially, using the Tobii Insight research program as the basis, the goal was to see how much time participants spent looking at the main scoreboard and other dynamic signage. In theory, this would detect just how valuable certain locations are inside the stadium -- so, the easier it is for you spot it, the more it could potentially cost for a company to put an ad there.  More [HERE]

258 Calls Out The Industry With This Interactive Billboard

Just got this very nice email from 258 in the UK. Its heartening to see the PublicAdCampaign project influencing people around the world as it is a labor of love.

Hey Jordan,

I don’t know if you take submissions for your blog but I thought I would email you over the piece of work I have just completed now I have some better documentation of it in action and very nearly almost put it on their blog.

The billboard appears blank at first but is user activated, as you walk past the piece, sensors are triggered and turn lights on one by one revealing a hidden word, WANKERS, my interpretation on what the bosses of these outdoor advertising companies think of us, the people who have to use this space without ever having had any say if advertising was ok. If we wish to not be exposed to adverts on the internet, tv or radio then we can stop using these things, we cannot however stop using public space and if we try to put our own messages in that space we are the ones ridiculed.

Anyway thanks for taking the time to read this as you know i'm a big fan of what you do and the message/knowledge public ad campaign spreads. Below is a link to my site & a link to a short video of the billboard in action (a longer version is set to follow). 

Kind Regards 258

More from 258 [HERE]

A Billboard That Purifies the Air Around It

My only question is why does this have to be a billboard?

VIA: The Atlantic Cities

Last year, scientists at University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Peru came up with an ingenious billboard that produced drinkable water. Now they’re at it again, this time giving billboards a different superpower: the ability to purify surrounding air. More [HERE]

Are You Scared Yet?

VIA Ban Billboard Blight

Big Brother Watching? How Digital Billboards Can Help Turn Public Space Into a Giant Spycam



The video above illustrates how a digital billboard in the UK reads license numbers of passing cars and uses that information to interact with the driver in an oil company marketing campaign. Digital billboards are already capable of determining what radio stations are on in passing cars, and billboards with embedded cameras and software to determine the gender and age of passersby are being tested in several places.

Objections to digital billboards are usually based one or more of the following: their extreme brightness, which constitutes visual blight and causes light trespass into homes and apartments; their excessive energy consumption; and their potential to distract drivers and present a hazard to motorists and pedestrians. But what of their potential, currently limited only by technology, to observe, record, and otherwise invade the privacy of anyone who happens into their territory? There aren’t any legal limits on this invasive activity, and the advertising industry is busily devising ever-more sophisticated means of gathering information and targeting consumers.

Which raises the question: Do people give up any right to privacy once they get into a car and drive down the street?

Spying Billboards

Nicolas Herve from the Debunkers collective was telling me about spying billboards in Paris when we meet last week. I haven't really heard much about them and didn't pay it too much mind until he sent me the article below from the New York Times.

Rick Rivera, left, and Nathan Lichon are drawn to an electronic billboard in Manhattan.

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: May 31, 2008

In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.

Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.

Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.

“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.

Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.

“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”

Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.

Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.

“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.

Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. The Philadelphia billboard was installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements. It installed the A&E billboard in association with Pearl Media, a Butler, N.J., company.

“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”

And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.

The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.

For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”

TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.

Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.

The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.

“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.

“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”

Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.

Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.

There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.

Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.

Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”

But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.

Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”