So, some very cunning people in Singapore believe that they have developed a system that allows a billboard to detect the gender of the person looking at it and display different material accordingly. (Details here.) What are we to make of this?
The first thing that occurs to me is that if this means that I have to see fewer ads about drunken oafs and fast cars then that’s a good thing. However…
The science graduate in me is immediately wondering what happens if two people of different genders look at the billboard at the same time.
Then my Feminist brain finally kicked into gear. Gendered services can often be a very good thing. We are only just learning, for example, that some medical treatments work very differently on men and women. In such cases knowing the biological make-up of the customer is important. But for advertising? I can see exactly what will happen. There will be few thing that are more socially embarrassing, especially for teenagers, than to have a billboard mistake your gender (and you can be sure that the algorithms won’t be 100% perfect). The primary result of this, therefore, is going to be people trying much harder to be gender conformant so as to minimize the risk of such disasters. Given that the software works off facial recognition, it is time to invest in the plastic surgery business, I guess.
Yep, it will often get it wrong resulting in public humiliation, surely it will be confused by crowds and even if it gets it right gender is not a perfect way of targeting marketing at an individual. I mean am I supposed to be interested in football, stupidly fast cars and large steaks just because I’m male? And conversely some girls are not going to be interested in ‘girly’ consumables but do actually want to know about football and not hockey… Time for us all to start wearing our V masks more often, methinks
On top of which, presumably, if you don’t conform to the stereotypes for your gender, it will try to sell you the wrong things anyway.