I did some work as a consultant for a big outdoor publisher and this has been a problem they've been attempting to solve for a decade or more.<p>This kind of physical, outdoor advertising has been hemorrhaging dollars to online ads for decades for several reasons but a big one is online having a much better (but far from perfect) attribution story. Attribution is the big, thorny problem in _all_ of advertising e.g. how do you know if Customer A saw Ad B and that they then went on to buy Product C.<p>In my experience this type of tech has two goals:<p>The first is measuring distribution with aggregate data about how many people saw the ad and when, then combining this with ethnographic data about the location (e.g. what proportion of people in this area fall into income bracket Y). This looks like "1,293 people have seen your ad in the last 60 minutes and here some demographic information about them". This is done with video and gait tracking, or radar/lidar for measuring volumes and people who 'engage' with the ad by lookijng at it for >N $TIME.<p>This is all perfectly possible and scalable and is what ClearChannel are currently doing, the product trick is to make it 'real-time' so advertisers can adjust their buys and unit distribution more flexibly when combined with digital signage (e.g. I'm going to move our ad from this unit in this location to this other unit in this other location in 'real-time' as there's more high net worth people there today). This also nicely ups outdoor spend (people use it more, it appears more sticky) but they also charge more for these more 'dynamic' outdoor units. There's a bunch of seriously dubious data the the publishers use to justify this new way of buying outdoor.<p>The second (and WAY worse one) is doing direct attribution (e.g. Did consumer sKIFW3890 see ad sdoflij0934r and then did they buy product 029w3r29 from merchant 203ei2-309ir). This has been the holy grail of outdoor for a decade but no one's been able to make it work. ClearChannel very clearly WANT to do it, which is creepy as all hell, but in my reading between the lines (and working in the industry a little) I don't _think_ this is what their Radar solution delivers, at the moment. I could be wrong, though.
So is the claim here that even though they dont know me at a personal level, they know me as ”shopper_1092716718” and can target me whenever they want?<p>If so, another fantastic example of expensive and complex regulation being gamed by the big players while the smaller entities are left with the cost.
It befuddles me to see that there so little pushback against the use of these types of tech.<p>We can't trust advertisers to limit themselves. They are only limited by what current technology can achieve but the goal posts keep moving and so is their appetite for more intrusive ways to gather data.<p>There is a strong competitive incentive for them to build a system capable of proving that a specific consumer seeing a specific ad ended up in a specific sale.
Imagine how much value that information could have to a company wanting to sell its products! Near-guaranteed sales, ad expenses laser-targetted to those who will actually buy! A boon for both advertisers and sellers!<p>Advertisers gather and cross-reference public information, credit information, track people tastes, political affiliations, phone location, where they go, what they look at... all to present consumers with hyper targeted adverts that result in more sales.
The more detailed and precise the data, the more targeted the ad and the higher the chances of persuading a customer to part with their money.
Removing uncertainty is the goal.<p>I sincerely hope that these overreaching applications of what is basically surveillance tech meet stronger resistance. Legal challenges are best, but some old-fashioned 'guerilla' tactics may also be effective...
I wouldn't be sorry for companies like Clear Channel either way.
Does anyone know what kind of data they get and how they get it? Is it through bluetooth? Wifi? NFC? Something else?<p>That's obviously something I would want to "adblock".
From what I read in the Belgian post where I got this info [0], to be conform to GDPR, they will only track with opt-in.<p>The trick is that opt-in will be in partners apps you will install on your phone.<p>"L'entreprise insiste cependant sur le fait que les consommateurs doivent donner leur autorisation pour permettre à Radar d'utiliser leurs données de géo-localisation. Cela se fait en général via les conditions générales de certaines applis." which roughly translate as<p>"The company insists on the fact that consumers have to give their authorization to allow Radar to use geoloc datas. It will be done via CLUF of some apps"<p>[0] <a href="https://datanews.levif.be/ict/actualite/les-panneaux-publicitaires-de-clear-channel-vont-tracer-les-passants-update/article-news-1319057.html" rel="nofollow">https://datanews.levif.be/ict/actualite/les-panneaux-publici...</a>