Intelligent advertising has finally become a reality…

Advertising is already pretty complex – on the internet pop up adverts are able to tell us where we live and make suggestions about stuff we’d like. It’s a little bit creepy, oh and it’s about to get creepier or more technologically complex, depending on your attitude to these things.

The Guardian reports that a new phenomenon known as “intelligent” advertising is about to become reality in London this week. If you’ve ever seen the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise and based on the short story by Philip K Dick, you’ll be familiar with the concept as intelligent advertising features heavily in the movie itself.

Intelligent advertising has already been trialled in countries such as America and Japan, but this is the first time that it will hit a European country. Children’s charity Plan UK has plans to set up an electronic ad hoarding beside a bus stop on Oxford Street.

The advert is so intelligent  that it will be able to tell the gender of a passer-by using special facial-recognition software to measure the distance between their eyes, width of their nose, their jawline and the shape of their cheekbone. The advert will then determine if the passer-by is a woman or man, and adopt its advertisement according.

So basically a woman will see a different advertisement than a man and vice versa.

It sounds cool and futuristic, but some people have called the technology “creepy” and have questioned if it will store any information about people who have their faces recognised by it. Clear Channel, the company that created the ad, says that no data will be stored.

So we have touchscreen phones, iPads, social networking, iris recognition, fingerprint scanners and intelligent advertising. What next? Well according to the company pretty soon we’ll be able to look at advertisements for clothes that actually show you wearing the outfit.

Okay, so that last one is a little bit creepy…