Billboard Ad for Banned Food in Russia Hides itself from the Cops!

Advertisements are meant to make people aware of your brand and if it is creative and engaging enough, it will turn them from spectators to customers. But what would happen if you’re not allowed to advertise your product or service? You do what a Russian brand did. The ad was created in response to Russia’s ban on food imported from the European Union and the United States. But one Italian grocery store there, Don Giulio Salumeria, kept selling its real Italian food—and to do that it came up with a bizarre out-of-home stunt to advertise to consumers without tipping off the police. 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 would switch from advertising a nice, fat wedge of Don Giulio Salumeria’s imported cheese, rolling over instead to an ad for a nice, completely non-contraband Matryoshka doll shop.
Was the stunt effective? That’s debatable. If you watch the ad on YouTube, you can clearly see the police had enough time to recognize the store’s ad for the banned foods before it changes. But it’s the idea behind the billboard that’s actually more interesting than the result it fared.

*This is an old article, Don Giulio Salumeria pulled this stunt in 2012 but like the blog mentioned, more than the effectiveness of this particular ad, the idea that even billboards can use facial recognition to this degree as they tailor offerings is astonishing and terrifying.