Castrol is combining speed camera technology with digital roadside billboards to tell around 200,000 drivers what the best oil for their vehicle is in a new ad campaign.
Ogilvy Advertising conceived the idea. It allows anyone to find out what is the best Castrol oil product for their car by reading the license plate number of the car.
It involves setting up automatic number plate recognition at five slow-moving traffic sites in London. When a camera picks up a registration plate number, it automatically searches the government database for the make and model of the vehicle, then delivers the correct oil recommendation on a large digital billboard further down the road.
Each recommendation will be displayed for 7.5 seconds, and due to data protection, no registration plate data will be stored.
Rob Stroud, marketing manager at Castrol, said: “We’re confident that the campaign will not only excite and intrigue drivers, but serve its purpose in helping motorists to understand the right oil message”.
The UK has an extensive network of automatic number plate recognition cameras, says Wikipedia. Effectively, the police and Security services track all car movements around the country and are able to track any car in close to real time. One of the biggest challenges with ALPR technology in the US is the accuracy of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — since each state has multiple license plate designs that must be recognized by the system.
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