Incredibly creepy or incredible and creepy?

Everyone who’s seen the Minority Report remembers the scene where Tom Cruise walks into the shopping centre and the adverts become personalised and speak directly to him. If you don’t remember, or you haven’t seen the film, take a look at the video below.

As you may already know, in 2013 Tesco signed with Lord Sugar’s company Amscreen to install TV screens in 450 of its petrol stations. Each screen has a camera in it, which scans the face of every consumer, automatically deciding their age and gender. Consumers are then shown targeted adverts based on those details. As you can imagine, once all of the flaws have been ironed out, this is going to be incredibly beneficial for marketers.

This year, Emotient, the leading authority on facial expression recognition and analysis, have taken the above a step further. Rather than focusing on relaying a message across to the consumer like Amscreen, they’re actually helping us gain more accurate and real-time data about consumers’ interactions with products, offers and the store itself. The technology works by tracking the seven primary facial emotions (joy, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and contempt) and then collating all of this information so that we can understand consumers’ reactions at POS. Click here to watch a video that will provide a more comprehensive explanation. 

As this technology is utilised in multiple locations and by all brands, shops and agencies will have a database of accurate consumer information that we've never been able to collect before. Not only will this information allow us to target consumers as seen in the clip from Minority Report, but we will also know how they're feeling, allowing us to tailor adverts to suit every age, gender and even mood. Incredible stuff don’t you think?