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Regular readers of Springwise may remember The Girl Store which we covered last year — an initiative set up to address the disadvantages and lack of opportunities many girls and women face outside of the developed world. Now we’ve come across a new, interactive bus-stop ad that recently drew attention to the issue of gender inequality in a unique way. Trialled for two weeks last month in an Oxford Street bus stop, Plan UK’s ad used facial recognition software in conjunction with an HD camera to determine whether a man or woman was standing in front of the screen, and then showed different content accordingly. Some 75 million girls around the world now have limited access to education, and 10 million girls in developing countries each year are coerced or forced into marriage while under the age of 18, according to Plan UK. As part of the group’s “Because I am a Girl” campaign to highlight such problems, the new “40-second Choices for Girls” advert showcases three 13-year-old girls: Jasmine from the UK, Bintou from Mali and Sur from Thailand. Even more compelling than the content of the ad, however, was that men and women at the Oxford Street bus stop saw different versions of the advert, once they opted in. After the technology scanned the viewer’s face, women were shown the full advert, complete with details about the three profiled girls’ lives; men, however, were denied access to the complete ad and shown a series of statistics about girls around the globe instead. The video below explains the campaign’s premise in more detail:

Combining facial recognition, touch capabilities and sound, Plan UK’s ad is a good example of how technology can be used to enforce an advert’s message, rather than simply delivering it. Marketers around the globe, take note! Spotted by: Parul Rohatgi