Track the exact number of people who saw your billboard/banner | Hacker News Reader

Track the exact number of people who saw your billboard/banner

Yep you saw it.

Track the exact number of people who saw your billboard/banner (or any form of outdoor marketing) using advanced facial recognition technology. All your info is synced to a particular database, so we can easily text you by following up on it.

We could do that through various means. Maybe ranking ads based on the time you spent looking at them—the one you spent the most time, the one you spent the average time, or the one you even went as far as looking multiple times, taking note or grabbing a picture.

It's something more like the ultimate way to gain hard data for outdoor marketing. And a way to constantly follow up as well.

Would be effective for major outdoor advertising companies.

What do y'all think?

View on HN

I think it is an awful idea, and it is justifiable to physically destroy those billboards and connected contraptions. In case you where actually serious with your post.

The thing is that tracking sales through advertising is already a solved problem since long ago, since before the internet. What you do is that you give people a discount/promotional code in the ad, that they can give when they make a purchase. Use different codes for different advertising channels. Then for every person who makes a purchase using the code, you will know that they saw that particular advertisement or heard from somebody who saw the advertisement.

With this way you have 0 false positives, you know that somebody using the promotion code did it because of the advertising. You don't have to do any analytics of website visitors, track people, or anything else. There is no uncertainty.

But business owners prefer to play the casino game of low-cost "bets" with ads on social media and Google - hoping that one of them is the right one. Trusting Facebook when they tell them that tens of thousands of people saw the ad but nobody bought. Hmmmm, better throw in another $50 in the ad-casino with some changed parameters.

Online advertising is a scam industry and I hope it gets crushed during this economic depression.

I prefer what these states do: https://movia.media/moving-billboard-blog/why-is-billboard-a...

I had worked in this industry for the past 5 years. I tried to start 3 years ago a company in this sector (outdoor billboard analytics). I will tell you one word: "Go away !".

The problem isn't the technology you use (facial recognition is working well but is too expensive). The average technology used to measure billboards is phone gps positions sent by applications that have contracts with data providers.

It's working pretty well but the sector is moving really slowly (in the US is much better than in Europe where all the services are corrupted). Nobody in the industry wants to change the method because they are selling the same amount of ODV (views) for 20 years and they don't want to have the allowed budgets advertisers are given to them.

It seems people are using QR codes for this.

Not so much billboards (given you’re usually driving by) but other outdoor signage and TV ads. Frankly it’s much more meaningful to know when someone takes an affirmative action than looks at something. To do the latter is pretty easy with the right shocking signage.

How about respecting people instead of treating them as resources that deserve exploitation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com