It’s REAL: Personalized Advertising From “The Minority Report” Comes to Life with IBM Watson, Bluemix, and Cleversafe
There is a scene in the movie “The Minority Report” where Tom Cruise is running (big surprise) through a mall (Click here to see the clip). As he is running, cameras are capturing his face and showing him personalized advertisements. Personalized advertisements would be a dream for advertisers, especially because “many consumers find personalized ads to be more engaging (54%), educational (52%), time-saving (49%) and memorable (45%).” IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty, said “I don’t think anybody’s just B2B or B2C anymore. You are B2I—business to individual.”
Now, thanks to IBM Watson's Visual Recognition and Text To Speech APIs we were able to make this dream a reality through our Visual Communications Platform (VisComm).
The platform focuses on delivering visual messaging to people based on a camera input. The service sends the captured photos to Watson and retrieves an Age and Gender for the faces in the image. It then delivers visual content tailored to the individual it sees from the IBM Cleversafe Object Storage platform (that we're using as a content repository to store our advertisements).
However, VisComm is more than just an advertisement platform. In fact, advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Because our service leverages IBM Watson it can actually be trained to recognize people which makes it even more versatile (and even closer to the original concept introduced in “The Minority Report”).
For instance, if a retail store had a loyalty program, they would be able to (considering they already had pictures of their members) train the service to recognize each person. Then, in that same scenario, the service would be able to show them messages that were based on past buying history and known preferences.
Also, human greeters would be made a thing of the past. For example, someone could make a reservation at a restaurant and be greeted by name when they arrived and could be shown a map to their table. At the same time, the system would notify staff so they would be ready to help the individuals as they arrive.
Visual Communications represents the future of message delivery. Just imagine what it could do!
