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The Signs Have Ears. This Sacramento Bee story (found via this Slashdot thread) talks about smart billboard technology that will be deployed in Sacramento next month; the billboards will be able to detect what radio stations passerbys are listening to, and use this to target advertisments. (Read the Slashdot thread for an explanation of how the radio detection works.)
Let's note that this is super-creepy and then move on. What really bugs me about this is how stupid of a solution to a problem this is. This thing can't possibly target individual motorists; it's in view of too many at once. And they're clearly not rapidly flipping between images as fast as possible as the balance of votes change. So there's some hysteresis built into the system; enough so that hundreds of motorists will have a "vote" for the next image displayed.
That's a pretty substantial number of votes. And there's no reason to believe that that flow of votes is going to have a really high variability over time. So I contend that this crazy real time gizmo will produce pretty much the same results you could have gotten by looking at Arbitron rankings and seeing what two or three radio stations are most popular at given times of days. And if you can do that, why not just feed in the Arbitron ratings?
These guys whole business model is predicated on the notion that demographics travel in packs. But people driving in cars are almost by definition not traveling packs.
Shrug. 11:37:38 PM () 
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