Imagine a system where metrics such as ‘Percentage of Audience that smiled/laughed’ became the standard by which we can measure television campaigns. This type of mass measurement is potentially just a little over a month away.
This becomes possible with the new Xbox One and its mandatory accessory: the Kinect. The Kinect is an advanced camera that will sit under the purchasers' TV and will allow them to interact with the Xbox using their body and voice. This new Kinect is far more advanced than the previous model and it can track the number of people in the room, audience expressions, where the viewer is looking, it has facial recognition and can even monitor heart rate via slight pigmentation fluctuations in the face.
It’s very possible to link this device to TV measurement. Nielsen could use the device with their sample audience, Microsoft could develop their own audience measurement division or it could be integrated with some of the new app-based TV streaming services such as TenPlay. Some of the ground work has potentially already been laid. Initial reports suggest that every Xbox One sold in Australia will come preloaded with TenPlay. With a simple “Do you allow Tenplay to access your Kinnect?” request, incentivised by a rewards program, media owners and buyers could have access to an unprecedented wealth of information.
Pre-existing metrics such as age and number of viewers in a household will instantly have far greater accuracy and a theoretically enormous sample size. Furthermore, metrics such as average eye dwell time during an advert, percentage of audience that laughed, percentage of audience that smiled and measurement of emotional engagement via audience heart rate all become potential targets that advertisements can be measured against.
Additionally, the facial recognition capabilities could be used to track each of the above metrics vs. frequency. If you were airing a humorous ad, suddenly ‘audience amusement’ vs. frequency becomes a viable metric and creative agencies suddenly become increasingly accountable to the affective reactions of the audience.
The impact of these types of cameras on measurement isn’t limited to TV. Intel has developed a very similar camera to the Kinect that is small enough to fit in the bezel of a laptop in exactly the same way your current laptop houses its webcam. If Comscore or Nielsen began to use these cameras in digital measurement, advertisers could finally be able to answer the question “How many people even look at our banners?”
While all this may sound fantastic from an advertiser’s point of view, the new Kinect has already been dubbed ‘a twisted nightmare’ by Germany’s Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Peter Schaar, and it’s not hard to see his point of view. By far the biggest hurdle to all of this is consumer sentiment; I can only imagine the backlash towards Microsoft once it became apparent that they were enabling surveillance-based TV measurement.
The first Kinect was the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever. On 22 November, the new iteration of this technology will begin its spread to hundreds of thousands of Australian living rooms and the future of measurement, for better or worse, comes within reach.
Shahram Ghaffurian
Media coordinator
PHD Network Melbourne