Walgreens was one of the first big names to launch a public facial recognition advertising campaign in 2019 with their ‘smart coolers,’ which are beverage fridges outfitted with facial scanners. The scanner could determine the age and gender of shoppers. The fridges targeted different ads to different people based on the information gathered by the cameras.
This week’s article is “Your Face is the Future of Targeted Marketing. Here’s Why Businesses Should Use Facial Recognition” by Yasin A. Facial recognition is widely used by businesses to improve targeted advertising. But can we make the use of facial recognition safer? The answer is yes. There are strong data privacy laws like GDPR, and a technology that is compliant with such laws can prove to be of great value in driving hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. Facial recognition technology has reserved a spot in the future of marketing. As technology develops, businesses will find more ways they can leverage to use facial data points. Businesses can develop custom loyalty program offering curated deals by identifying regular customers in-store. Businesses can use emotion detection in the future to understand how people respond to and interact with new products before rolling them out to big-box retailers.
Several businesses are getting ready to implement facial recognition to boost their marketing performance and outperform the competition. The real game-changer is the ability to scan people’s faces and identify crucial characteristics while being compliant with data privacy laws. In the future, the pool of consumer data points is bound to increase drastically, and facial recognition technology plays a huge role in that.