No, officer, no contraband on sale here!
This Ad for Banned Food in Russia Can Hide Itself From the Cops
Websites are already able to serve up ads customized for whoever happens to be viewing a page. Now an ad agency in Russia is taking that idea one step further with an outdoor billboard that’s able to automatically hide when it spots the police coming.
The ad was created in response to Russia’s ban on food imported from the European Union and the United States last summer, which hit a grocery store called Don Giulio Salumeria particularly hard since it relied on selling authentic Italian food. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t hard for the grocery store to continue to get and sell its Italian imports, but to advertise this to consumers, it hired an ad agency called The 23 to create this unique billboard.
With the aid of a camera and facial recognition software, the technology was slightly tweaked to instead recognize the official symbols and logos on the uniforms worn by Russian police. And as they approached the billboard featuring the advertisement for Don Giulio Salumeria’s imported Italian goods, it would automatically change to an ad for a Matryoshka doll shop instead…
Doesn’t announcing this on the internet kinda defeat the purpose?
And what about plain clothes and/or off duty cops?
Honestly, whatever happened to good old fashioned bribery?
In Russia, cops bribe YOU!
Actually, wait. They don’t. Not at all. Forget it.
The ads appear to be pretty effective. Not at hiding themselves from police, though. In the animation in the article the police have to get right up on it before anything happens. But they do seem to be effective at, what I suspect the real point of the auto-hiding feature: publicity. I doubt the cops really care about contraband spaghetti.
