The Minority Report
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
‘The Minority Report‘ is a 1956 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe and ‘Minority Report‘ is a 2002 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg and loosely based on said short story.
Neither of them have anything much to f***ing do with digital signage, digital out of home, SoLoMo or indeed the future of advertising.
Thursday afternoon @neoadvertising tweeted “Minority Report Mall Scene http://t.co/2eTnhox via @youtube” and earlier in the week we had to head off the moderator of #smics2011 in Monte Carlo from putting ‘Minority Report’ up as some kind of bellwether.
Now whilst the ‘advertising wall’ that sensed Tom Cruise’s character approaching and responding seemed prescient (it conveniently ignored everyone else in the crowd by the way) the continual use of the term (lazy and misguided at best) means that our ‘intern’ project for the summer vacation is watch the film again and again and précis a rebuttal.
As Dave Haynes summed up nicely for us “my concern is that it suggests what is happening now is or will soon be just like that, when that is not what the video analytics guys actually do. They cannot match faces and ID people because they don’t have the database of faces to use”
No doubt the precogs have already seen this.
July 14th, 2011 at 17:48 @783
Just to add to that … beyond how NewsCorp is probably the only media company out there with a database of faces (that’s a joke, I hope), the video analytics guys don’t even do facial recognition. They do pattern detection, and the code is trained to look for patterns in the video stream that look like what it understands to be faces. Then it can break down imperfectly by age range and gender.
The interesting stuff in what they do is how the detected pattern and content triggers could be logos on a hat or shirt, so someone with a Nike swoosh could be pitched on Adidas.
July 14th, 2011 at 18:44 @822
Mr Haynes
Expect to hear from my lawyers we know what you look like.
Oh and we have your VM PIN
July 15th, 2011 at 14:13 @634
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303678704576440253307985070.html?KEYWORDS=facial+recognition+device