• The New York Times, Monday, June 2, 2008 12 PM

The best estimates about billboard viewership typically come from foot traffic counts or highway reports that tally how many people pass by. A new generation of billboards is more accurate. They have tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by, including gender, age and how long they looked at the outdoor ad. A central database collects the information.

Privacy becomes an obvious question. Startup companies say the new tech does not store the images of people, but rather software analyzes the person's face to establish sex, age ad race.

The goal is to tailor a digital billboard display to the person standing in front of it, "to show one ad to a middle-aged white woman and a different one to a teenage Asian boy." The futuristic tech has been used in Ikea stores in Europe, McDonald's restaurants in Singapore, and has just arrived in the United States, including on a train station billboard in Philadelphia for the Philadelphia Soul indoor football team.

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