They All Want to Know Your Face

Next time you’re looking up at a billboard, there’s a chance it may be looking back down at you. Immersive Labs has developed software for digital billboards that can measure the age range, gender, and attention-level of a passerby and quantify the effectiveness of an outdoor marketing campaign. Beyond just bringing metrics to outdoor advertisements, facial detection technology can tailor ads to people based on their features.

Vending machines have been making a high-tech resurgence, selling everything from iPods to high-end cupcakes – some now include cameras that are analyzing your face. Facial detection technology can enable a machine to present a customer with items they would typically purchase based on their physical characteristics.

With today’s Internet-connected TVs and attached devices, companies have a chance to peek into the living room to see who’s around. Microsoft Kinect, the popular motion-sensing gaming device, has advanced abilities to identify its users and has built an entire advertising platform around “audience engagement” – being able to tell who is in the room, how old they are and whether they are paying attention to what is on the screen.

Today, these types of sensors may be part of the television when you purchase it already; in the last year alone, Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, and Toshiba have each introduced “Smart TVs” with facial recognition technology built in.

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Radio still dominates music discovery

Radio remains by far the main way US consumers discover music, despite the likes of YouTube and other rival options, according to research by Nielsen. Its Nielsen Music 360 Report of 3,000 online consumer surveys found 48% of those questioned discover music most often through radio stations, compared to 10% from friends and relatives and 7% from YouTube. However, when it comes to listening to music YouTube rules among teenagers with 64% saying they use it to hear music compared to 56% listening to music on the radio, 53% through iTunes and 50% to music on CD.

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AP Stylebook moves faster than Merriam-Webster as linguistic authority

Merriam-Webster has officially sanctioned a bunch of words by adding them to the dictionary, hereby removing most of the fun of saying things like “F-bomb” and “sexting.” Merriam-Webster paints this as a way of keeping up with the changing nature of language, but of course we all know that it’s a direct challenge to the AP Stylebook, which every cardiganed copy editor knows is the true arbiter of a journalist’s vocabulary.

The inclusion of these words raises an interesting question: Which is more in tune with the English language: Merriam-Webster, which traces its origins to the early 1800s, or the AP’s Stylebook, which only two years ago sanctioned “website“?

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Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall

Magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore. Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.

Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but this time all categories were punished in the pileup.

It’s not just consumers who are playing hard to get: advertising is down 8.8 percent year to date over the same miserable period a year ago, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. With readership in such steep decline and advertising refusing to come back, magazines are in a downward spiral that not even their new digital initiatives can halt.

Read more at the NY Times