AudienceCount.com

With the recent advancement in Digital Signage webs, blogs, clippings, twitter and other sources, the article by Paul Flanigan on “Do we need digital signage audience measurement right now?” I would like to make some conclusions and ideas that will help us understand why we should measure the audience.
Flanigan explains that television had not measured its hearings until 1950, according to Nielsen, and there was a measuring active until four years later. The same thing happened on the Internet, where they spent about 15 years until it began to be measured. However, in this first article I wonder what if we could not begin to measure it before we would have done? TV and Internet are different… digital signage has his own way.
OVAB presented a set of guidelines for assessing the audience in a space and place. Its president, Suzanne Alecia emphasized that these were guidelines for reporting on a common audience. Not all businesses qualify for the guidelines … but in reality the problem is that developers and operators of digital signage channels are not taking into account the audience in the development of content, therefore how can measure it? Currently, each DS channel is offering its personal value for advertisers (each has its own economic assessment on how much charge the advertiser), so do not take into account all these variables.

Flanigan was asked, are we taking into account the audience that changes according to the sales point where he is? As Jim says Lucas, VP Marketing division of Draftfcb Shopper, “there are hundreds of messages vying for the attention of the buyer.” And Bill Gerba goes a little further, “even if you do everything possible to successfully integrate the screens in place, the differences in personality, demographics or the spectators mind can be very different from one place to another. It is equally difficult to measure all channels of digital signage because not all the public will have the same capacity for attention, the situation will be different from the screens, or even the interior decoration of the shop. But it is also true that without a minimum standards will continue as before: to provide advertisers with data and valuable information and that the real benefit.
Each channel of traditional TV, press, magazines or Internet, have their standards of measurement and its measurement, accepted by all, and admit error margins greater than those variables that can affect the digital signage … but without them there are no benchmarks and everything would be subjective. In marketing, we cant guide investment by way of subjectivity. And, after all, a person who turns to a screen is an impact …
´We need measurement because we need references and real data to improvement our digital contents. The awareness should start in the digital signage companies, as many do not give importance to its audience (which is what will decide the future of their SD channels), and media planners, who still do not fully understand the digital signage.
How will our advertiser wait to see if his investment is profitable in DS?

The television programming, editorials, news, banners … are modified depending on the audience and how it evolves. All the more reason to have a real audience measurement in digital signage, instead of asking if we really need it … Will not measure the audience if they are the judges of our digital signage channel?… and they decide the future of contents?

Roi Iglesias

Digital Signage Creativo

MediaPost comments on Forrester Research predictions that interactive marketing spend will hit $25.6 billion this year, up 11% from $23.1 billion in 2008, despite being flat, as marketers shift money from traditional media to digital channels.

That total, which also includes search, email, social media and mobile marketing dollars, is expected to more than double to nearly $55 billion by 2014. “This growth is due to marketers seeking lower cost, more accountable channels which are also widely used by their customers,” wrote Forrester analyst Shar Van Boskirk, in a blog post previewing the firm’s interactive spending forecast due out in June.

A recent Forrester survey of more than 200 marketers found that 60% planned to increase interactive budgets by pulling back spending on traditional outlets. The biggest victim of the trend will be direct mail, which stands to be slashed by 40%. Print will not fare much better, with spending on newspapers expected to be cut by 35%, and magazines by 28%.

Reported by MediaPost

By contrast, mobile and social media will enjoy the biggest spending gains in interactive — increasing nearly 70% to $391 million and almost 60% to $716 million, respectively, in 2009. But the recession’s toll on other segments will leave display advertising virtually flat at $7.8 billion, and email up only slightly to $1.2 billion.

Search marketing, which will get a lift from the shift of traditional and online display ad dollars, is expected to grow 14% to $15.4 billion.

A number of market research firms and Wall Street analysts have revised down their estimates of online ad revenue this year as a result of the worsening economy, and are now predicting single-digit growth. Online ad growth fell to 11% last year after recent years of 20% or better gains as the weakening economy finally caught up with Internet spending.

Through 2014, Forrester predicts that interactive marketing will grow 17%, led by social media, projected to grow 34% to $3.1 billion. Mobile will follow, increasing 27% to $1.3 billion; display advertising, 17% to $16.9 billion; search, 15% to $31.6 billion; and email, 11% to $21 billion.

A couple of comments posted to the Forrester forecast preview noted how small the mobile estimate was despite a relatively high projected growth rate. In response, Van Boskirk wrote: “I remain very cynical about mobile.” Despite great potential, “the reality is that today marketers aren’t embracing it as they are other emerging media, nor are the mechanics of how to use and measure mobile worked out to a degree that will convince mobile naysayers (like me) that it is worth all the effort.”

She also noted that only 28% of marketers claim to be using mobile today, and the percentage of firms expecting to adopt mobile this year has actually declined from 2008. For what it’s worth, Forrester’s mobile prediction of $391 million this year is still higher than the recently revised forecast of $229 million by Interpublic’s Magna unit.

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April 16, 2009 - Toronto & Montreal, Canada. CognoVision Solutions Inc., a leading provider of automated audience measurement and targeted marketing solutions, and BroadSign, a market leader in
Software-as-a-Service solutions for managing digital signage networks, have integrated their reporting modules into CognoVision’s Anonymous Impression Metric (AIM) Analytics system to offer a first-of-its-kind joint application that measures campaign effectiveness based on audience numbers, viewer behavior, and ad-triggered actions.

The AIM Campaign Analytics service is now available to all marketers advertising on BroadSign-powered networks.

The integrated campaign analytics platform has been field-tested since February 2009 at two grocery stores in the Greater Toronto area, on 25 screens operated by The Marketplace Station.

CognoVision’s AIM system processes the data feed from the optical sensors embedded in the screens and generates anonymous viewership statistics. The aggregated data is then correlated with proof-of-play reports from the BroadSign network management software using CognoVision’s web-based analytics tool, which is consistent with the Out-of-home Video Advertising Bureau’s (OVAB) Audience Metrics Guidelines. The reports generated in real time provide insights regarding what specific ads were seen, how long each ad was watched for, and viewer gender breakdown for each ad.

“The combination of our analytics application and BroadSign’s proof-of-play data opens up unprecedented opportunities for marketers to gauge the effect of almost every ad dollar invested in a digital signage campaign,” said Haroon Mirza, Director of Business Development at CognoVision. “By using our system, both network operators and advertisers can eliminate a significant amount of guesswork from campaign creation. They will see what content works better, what ad slot length is more effective, how long the loop should be for maximal impact, and can adjust other critical parameters. The audience data can also be processed against point-of-sale records to correlate the
digital signage campaigns with actual sales lift.”

“For years, the digital signage industry has been looking for a metric that quantifies advertising dollars spent against reach,” said Raji Kalra, Managing Director of The Marketplace Station. “Terms such as GRPs and CPM stem from traditional non-digital media and are diplomatic ways to express potential, not actual impressions. However, by combining CognoVision’s audience metrics and BroadSign’s content playback reporting mechanism in a single application, we can now extract true viewership statistics containing rich data that has been almost impossible to obtain up until now.”

According to Mirza, the ability to gather campaign analytics on a continuous basis across all screens in a digital signage network, 24 hours per day, provides instant insights about customer behavior and campaign effectiveness at a fraction of the cost of traditional research methods.

Retail environments are turbulent, but out-of-home digital signage is bucking the trend. Digital signage, a powerful “narrowcast” medium, offers dynamic messaging with a high impact. Advancements in technology such as audience measurement and interactivity are making the medium even more attractive as traditional mediums such as TV and radio are becoming increasingly marginalized, costly and diluted.

STRATACACHE’s digital signage software now has audience measurement capabilities. ActiVia AM—the audience measurement module—uses simple, inexpensive USB cameras similar to the solutions provided by Quividi, CognoVision, and TruMedia iTRI to provide consumer impression metrics, including:

• Customer impressions
• Dwell time
• Impressions per merchandised object
• Impressions by time of day
• Impressions by brand or category
• Basic consumer demographics

ActiVia’s audience measurement module allows marketing executives to continuously deliver dynamic messaging and broadcast content based upon the viewer demographics while gathering impression metrics, passerby gaze counts, and dwell times. The software is a highly optimized, web-accessible solution for digital marketing and merchandising that combines STRATACACHE’s content delivery platform with state-of-the-art digital media technology. With multi-layering features, dynamic data sources, interactive capabilities and audience measurement, ActiVia manages the entire digital signage lifecycle for networks containing up to 250,000 concurrent devices.

In my personal opinion I feel that STRATACACHE’s Audience Measurement solution will become a popular feature combined with their award winning Digital Signage software to provide a real turn-key solution.

Lord Leverhulme said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half’.

Now, an innovative, low cost system to evaluate and measure the impact of outdoor and point of sale advertising has been launched by LumiCam Ltd.  This new breed of signboard uses computer vision to detect viewers and collect marketing demographics.  It uses a camera and software to record how long someone looks at an advert, their gender and soon will estimate age too.

Managing director Rangesh Nallan said: “We expect significant interest in LumiCam, especially now, when every advertising dollar, euro or pound has to work extra hard. LumiCam can be installed from just US $125, a small price for a greatly improved method of evaluating effectiveness.”

The internet revolution changed the way advertising works in the virtual world, as it’s very easy to track individuals visiting a website, check their past searches and their locality.

A handful of companies with expertise in face detection technologies have begun to market audience measurement tools for the real world.  In signboards, or product displays with audience measurement cameras, benefits to the advertiser, ad-agency or ad-space provider are clear. Ability to benchmark how good an advert location is, or how well a campaign is doing, means that performance related prices can be set for campaigns and ad-space.

LumiCam detects and tracks faces looking at adverts and products and estimates the viewer’s attention span.  Cameras collect data anonymously so consumers are not identified individually but benefit both directly and indirectly. The act of measuring their attention span and viewer numbers gives the advertiser the quality of viewings (scaled attention span x the number of viewers). The quality of viewings tells the advertiser if there is actual interest in the product or the viewer just happened to briefly look at the advert, so giving the user data to improve products, shop layouts and adverts.

LumiCam generates simple charts and data in excel spreadsheet format, so users can perform further analysis if required. Users may prefer to fit these units on product shelves, or locations where there is no access to the internet. A wireless camera version enables software to be installed on an store computer, with the camera anywhere in the store. This way, LumiCam is both cheap and easy to install. For outdoor applications, a special stand-alone version is available.

LumiCam Ltd is a subsidiary of Lumisigns Ltd. (www.spslumisigns.com).
For more information about LumiCam, contact Rangesh Nallan.
E: spsrangesh@gmail.com or M: 44(0)7899 900 330 or visit: www.lumicam.net

We have been delivering the Wallflower Alive! audience measurement module for the past year now.

We use Facial Recognition technology provided by Intelligent Earth of Glasgow.  They have many years experience in the FR field especially in the security sector.  We use their software to deliver accurate gender and age grouping analysis to our package.

We have over 20 years experience in analytic software development and use the combination of this experience and the FR analysis to deliver what we feel is probably the most fully realized Audience Measurement product of this type available.

The resulting analytics enable users to not only obtain slice and dice analysis with comprehensive reporting of audience statistics but also combine this with play history.

The final outcome is to be able to determine exactly what was viewed when and even possibly relate this to sales analysis to complete the mix. We offer optional intelligent advertising that displays media dependent upon the gender and age group of the viewer.

We are currently developing the next generation of intelligent advertising that will measure the effectiveness of media in terms of numbers of viewers, dwell time etc and then automatically adjust play schedules to promote popular media and demote less popular media followed up by a remeasure.

i would welcome any comments and suggestions on this approach.  Visit us on www.wallflowerglobal.com for more information.

AudienceCount.com Has Opened Up Its Doors For Anyone To Contribute.

Due to time limitations on our end we at AudienceCount.com have decided to open the flood gates of information by allowing anyone to register and contribute to the Digital Signage Audience Measurement community. This will allow anyone the ability to discuss a particular audience measurement technology, comment on another blogs post, or explain a misconceived notion on a technology. Overall, we’re the right place to start the conversation on Audience Measurement in the Digital Signage world.

To get started click on the right hand menu labeled > Signup > Register

*Note* All articles must have some relevance to the Digital Signage Audience Measurement industry.

New York, NY — March 17th, 2009 — Creative and content leaders will share their experience on how digital signage networks can engage customers and generate ad sales at the 4th Annual Digital Signage Content Strategies Summit, to be held on May 12 and 13, 2009 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

The world’s only content-dedicated conference for the digital signage industry will feature presentations from:

• Al Wittemen, Managing Director of Shopper Marketing, TracyLocke
• Christopher Gray, Psy.D. VP of Shopper Psychology, Saatchi & Saatchi X
• Mike Geiger, Chief Digital Officer, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
• Doug Bolin, Experience Lead/Content Strategy Lead, Razorfish
• Andreas Redlich, Executive Creative Director, Publicis Germany
• Peter Müller-Brühl, Business Development Leader, Fischer Appelt, TV Media
• Brian Hirsh, President, Retail Entertainment Design
• Lon Otremba, CEO, Access 360 Media

Thousands of flat panel screens displaying content can now be found in locations ranging from retail and grocery stores, to bars, health clubs, malls and more. The networks provide a mix of programming and advertising similar to television with the ability for customization depending on location, time of day and context.

The medium is more than “signage” said Conor Brady, VP Creative for digital marketing agency, Organic. “It has the potential to go way beyond push messaging.”

Brady will join Mike Geiger, Chief Digital Officer at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and John Montgomery, Executive Creative Director at Threshold Interactive on a panel titled “From the bedroom to the streets…storytelling via place-based media.”

“I’m looking forward to our session as we explore how new technology can evolve our approach to Digital Out-of-Home advertising, to create a more powerful dialogue between brand and consumer,” said Brady.

The audience will also hear from Al Wittemen, Managing Director of Shopper Marketing at Dallas-based TracyLocke, who is similarly excited about the medium’s role in transforming message targeting, relevancy and most importantly, ROI.

“Today’s technology and evaluation techniques allow us to create content, measure it, analyze it, then change it accordingly,” he said. “This is retail at its best.”

Additional insights on shopper marketing and in-store media will come from Saatchi & Saatchi X, Target and Best Buy.

Details: http://www.strategyinstitute.com/051209_content/dsp.php

The two-day Summit will showcase content from North America and Germany, offer tips on leveraging digital assets across platforms, and provide information on content strategy and sourcing.

Sponsors for the event include Arbitron Out-of-Home, MediaTile and TouchTunes.

About Strategy Institute

Strategy Institute is a leader in delivering timely knowledge and best practices to the digital signage industry since 2005. The organization was one of the first in the space and continues to support and foster growth of digital signage/narrowcasting through its annual conferences.

Contact:

Yashod Bhardwaj
Marketing Project Manager
Strategy Institute
New York | Toronto
1-866-298-9343 x239
bhardwaj@strategyinstitute.com
www.strategyinstitute.com

***CORRECTED: we wrote about Cognovision when we should have wrote about Quividi.  We also got a response from Paolo at Quividi and will repost his entire message at the end of the article.  Deepest aplogies for the confusion!***

This post is about a week late, so let me start by sending my apologies to the readers out there.  It turns out that the grand plan of interviews of key players on camera was somewhat of a fools errand.  While there was quite a bit of press-related events, it turned out that I had to focus most of my time on my own business and didn’t have nearly the time I would have liked to focus on AudienceCount.

It was a well attended event 3,000 attendees this year, which is down from 3,500 last year.  This according to the organizers and reported on our friend Adrian’s site, the DailyDOOH.  (He has actually covered some great articles lately, and we’ll be pointing towards some of them in a post shortly.)  I have a problem with this though, and it speaks to the idea of measurement: it sure didn’t FEEL like 3,000 attendees.  As you may have seen in my post from the DSE, TruMedia provided measurement for the DSE, but we haven’t heard anything about the results.  Would you like to comment folks?  The number just doesn’t sit right with me and I would like to hear the exact number.  When’s the last time you went to a baseball game and the announcer said “tonight’s attendence is… 40,000″?  Never happens.  I would like to see the exact number of people that walked the floor, not just the people that registered, especially because registration was free this year and people may have reserved a spot with the idea of attending and didn’t show up.

The “Big Three” measurement companies were at the DSE with TruMedia and Quividi having the largest reach.  Quividi did the unthinkable by making our friend Manolo a woman while providing the breathtaking gaffe (defined by Michael Kinsley as when a “politician tells the truth”) by saying “we don’t do Asians”

**** RESPONSE REPOSTED HERE WITH PERMISSION******

As originally submitted in response to the original post, Quividi would like to address the technical issues that are raised in this article. Quividi’s gender recognition algorithm has a success rate in excess of 86%, as openly stated in both our website and in the technical documentation. What this means is that, on average, a little over one person in ten will be either misclassified or not classified at all. Quividi absolutely wants to stress that any classification errors do NOT depend on ethnicity. As a matter of fact, these errors are not easy to trace back to simple facial features since the algorithm does not work the same way a human brain would. (In passing, note that humans score “only” 95% on gender classification tests!)

The 86% success rate is achieved via a training procedure on a database of over ten thousand manually labeled faces. The face database has been built as to include the largest possible distribution of age brackets, ethnic types and hairstyles and has no “racial” bias. We sells our product all over the world and need consistent success rates. At the same time, we have never developed nor will we ever develop any ethnicity classification mechanism in our software — that would simply be out of line with Quividi’s core values.

As opposed to our competitors, Quividi is the only audience measurement company to show gender results in real time in their demo. We can afford to do this because we are very confident about our software and because we have always been completely transparent about the capabilities of our product. Normally the occasional and unavoidable mistake is more of a source of chuckles than of a serious critique and we are surprised that this was not the case at DSE. At any rate, as the best statement of confidence in our technology, Quvidi’s software remains freely available for download so that readers can judge for themselves.

I will write in more depth on this, my conversations with MediaTile’s Keith Kelsen and Arbitron’s Rob Winston, and some of the stunning truth telling I heard.

In brief, the good of DSE was that measurement was very well represented.

The bad… well, lots of failures of technology (see Manolo’s manhood above) and the frank assessment of a leader in the industry.  I sat to meet with with him and waited for about 5 minutes while he spoke with the head of one of the measurement companies.  After he was finished with the conversation, we chatted for a few minutes before he gave some insight: (paraphrasing) “This guy was telling me that we need to move faster getting their products into more of our clients’ hands.  I told him that I thought we were moving at a good pace but the reality is our client’s arent’ asking for it.”

Ouch.  This was just one of the many conversations I heard on this.  I will give my prescriptions in another post.

Thanks for your patience all.