Quividi’s Critical Audience Measurement Options At Retail
Guest Author: Paolo Prandoni
(Chief Scientific Officer & Co-founder at QUIVIDI)
The panel “Critical Measurement Options at Retail: Strategies for Success” was the lunch session on the second day at DSE. The panel included Nikki Baird from RSR research, who also acted as the moderator, Herb Sorensen from TNS-Sorensen and myself. The session was very well attended, with 50+ people doubtlessly enticed in part by the free lunch boxes 
Widespread munching did not impair participation, however, with many interesting questions and comments from the audience.
The panel tried to answer the question of where we stand today in terms of in-store audience measurement, both from a technological and a methodological point of view; the idea is that on one hand technology provides us with more and more data and, on the other hand, we need methods to make sense of both new and more traditional data (such as surveys and historical trends). In this sense, many frameworks have been proposed and others will appear in the future; some focus on rates (i.e. standard measures such as GRP and CPM) and others on effectiveness (i.e. closure rates and ROI).
If we concentrate on the data sources, a possible snapshot of what is available today and where we are heading is pictured below. The graph shows a taxonomy along 2 axes: the horizontal axis is the level of “focus” of each measuring strategy, from generic audience information pertaining more to the location than to the individuals to very focused data providing detailed information about the single shopper. The vertical axis is the current level of penetration for the total customer population: methods at the bottom of the range are applied only to small panels or samples; methods at the top can be deployed to reach and measure the totality of the population. There is a cost barrier which prevents most of the very informative methods such as polls, diaries or glass-mounted eye tracking devices to be deployed en masse. Similarly, systems such as loyalty cards or Bluetooth-based tracking kiosks are inherently limited by their adoption rate, which has pretty much stabilized (75% and 40% respectively). Some technological solutions which have appeared recently are still hovering today in in the middle of the penetration/detail space (see the yellow bubble); because of their technological potential, however, they have the possibility to bypass barriers and move closer to the coveted upper-right corner as technology improves and costs go down.
Another aspect which was brought to the forefront in the panel was the inherent synergies between the emerging measuring methods and digital signage. The key points enabled by DS (as opposed to other POS advertising techniques) are the presence of connectivity, which allows for instant, world-wide benchmarking; the availability of computational power, which drives costs down for technological measurement solutions and dovetails with interactivity; the dynamism of the medium which allows for reactivity and message optimization.
Finally, the discussion moved into the details of what measurements can and should focus on, namely exposure, impressions, interaction and sales. Exposure, a metric very close to footfall, is a starting point for DS but by no means a sufficient metric and a rather exhaustive critique of its improper use followed. Impressions is closer to the heart of the matter and that’s where technology really comes into play, from sophisticated eye-tracking devices (Sorensen’s showed a particularly nifty device he had developed) to mass-deployed face-based audience measurement devices a-la Quividi. Interaction with the product and the message is also the potential domain of technological advances such as RFID, while measuring actions implies correlation with the sales figures.
A final case study (by which time had all but ran out) was presented in the form of a “mixed technique” product display shelf developed by Quividi and others for a cell-phone retailer. The interplay between an embedded digital signage screen, RFID, face detection and tracking and the availability of the real product items represent a cutting-edge example of what in-store measurement can accomplish today.
