Where to gather data

Whatever type of location you run, whether it’s a grocery store, gas station, bank branch, or a restaurant, you can drastically increase the efficiency of your business. Brands and manufacturers can improve their marketing effectiveness and boost sales. Set up the digital platform in the space you run and get valuable metrics and statistical data to adjust your marketing campaigns and budgets.

From the brands’ perspective, advertisers can get the overall impression of the marketing campaign from the audience by gathering data from multiple points of sale and access insightful dashboards in a single place.

How to determine an ad’s effectiveness

When a customer enters a store, glances at an ad, and then buys an item by the brand shown in that ad, the event usually stays off the records. The store personnel can’t keep an eye on every customer, so they report a subjective view of how well a specific ad has worked. As a result, you get unclear data that includes a huge amount of human error. Of course, the extra income for this group of items in the cash register could represent more precise feedback, but it’s still a lot of manual work.

AI to understand what customers are up to

Thankfully, you can gather all these metrics automatically with computer vision systems that are designed specifically for this task. A camera installed at a touchpoint can detect people and distinguish the store’s staff from the customers. Capture visitors’ interest in a specific ad, determine the demographic characteristics of the viewers (male/female, age, etc.), and even track a smile. If the ad is supposed to invoke a smile, the system can easily track its effectiveness.

You can even show a respective ad when a person with matching parameters is detected. For example, you can show men’s cologne when a man approaches a digital screen, and show a female collection when a woman looks at the ad.

Gathering data

To gather the data, first you need to have ads: it can be a digital display with ads in loops. Second, you need cameras that will be installed close to your ad, so the system can track a person's eye movements. And the most important part is the heart and brain of all that  —  the Displayforce platform. It introduces the AI algorithms we mentioned earlier, and saves the data in the cloud so marketing people can easily access it and generate reports.

If you have a limited budget and can’t have multiple digital surfaces in your retail location, you can use printed ads instead. We’re sure that it’ll work with non-digital surfaces as well, and all metrics will be gathered with the camera mounted nearby.

As for the data, the system collects:

• Number of shows
• Number of views
• Conversion rate

• Dwell time, or the time spent looking at the ad

• Emotions

• Core metrics, such as Total Visitors, Opportunity to See (the ad), Average Contact Frequency & Average Attention Time

Also, you can see the audience breakdown among those who were interested in this ad. For example, male vs. female ratio, age, and many other parameters, like hair color. This all is crucial data for learning the feedback and making more personalized and efficient ads.

All sensors gather impersonalized data, so it’s fully GDPR compliant. Every new customer is assigned an ID that’s not linked with the person’s name or any other personal details. The system recognizes 18 facial metrics, such as gender, age, hair, emotions, and saves this data in the cloud for further analysis. Also, it can show a targeted, personalized message or an ad based on these parameters.

Ever-improving system

The engineers at Displayforce have put lots of effort into making the data capture and processing as precise as possible to reduce errors. The AI core system has been trained on hundreds of thousands of images of people, and it clearly describes each person and their characteristics in live mode. Displayforce is capable of withstanding high loads of data and it’s fail-protected, which means you can have as many ads and cameras in your store as you want and still get precise data that will help you make the right business decisions.

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