Amscreen to roll out image recognition technology to track out-of-home ad audiences

Digital outdoor advertising company Amscreen is set to roll out image recognition technology in a bid to sophisticate audience measurement tools and improve Out of Home ad campaigns.

Amscreen – owned by Lord Sugar – plans to roll out the new face-tracking system across 6,000 screens, enabling them to identify campaign viewers according to age and gender.

Amscreen will join with Quividi over the coming months to roll out the new technology across their networks, which have a weekly audience reach of 50 million.

“Advertising is changing now,” said Amscreen’s CEO Simon Sugar. “[Amscreen is] aware that the media industry as a whole is moving more and more towards real-time planning and audience measurement and away from traditional modeled audience metrics, hence we are now placing significant investment and resource on delivering this kind of depth of insight.”

Sugar Jnr. said that Amscreen wants to bring outdoor to the 21st century and, in time, hopes to use image recognition across its entire network to tailor ad campaigns in real-time.

Lord Sugar has said that this Amscreen-Quividi venture is going to be an “advertising revolution.”

However, Amscreen is not the first company to use face recognition to enhance audience measurement in advertising.

Ocean Outdoor has been trialling the technology in London, and CEO Tim Bleakley said that he has seen the trials offer almost 100% accurate results and notes how hugely beneficial it will be for advertisers.

“We can prove that on Christmas Eve and on Valentine’s day, men leave their shopping to the last minute,” he said. “This is valuable for brands such as LVMH or Chanel.”

Elsewhere, Route – the research body for outdoor advertising – unveiled its new out-of-home audience research system at the beginning of the year, which invested £19 million into investigating how Britain moves when it comes to seeing outdoor ads.