Optical Sensor for Demographic Customer Analysis

Pysense Sensor

Application

• Pyramics provides data and hardware solutions to measure marketing success at the Point-of-Sale. Our Customers are in the business of out-of-home advertising, market research and retailing. We use intelligent optical Sensors to collect anonymous data on shopping behavior and customer interactions with advertisement screens. This Information is used to sustainably optimize Marketing-Strategies
• After two years of development in cooperation with Fraunhofer IIS and Basler AG Pyramics has been founded in April 2016. Since then we did several projects with well-known Retailers and Market Research companies. The Team has currently 5 members and received the exist Start-Up grant for innovative Business Ideas. 

Solution and Benefits 

• Pysense is an optical Sensor designed to capture anonymous data on age, gender, ad-interactions and emotions of customers and advertising audience. It uses Fraunhofer IIS´s world leading SHORE-Software for facial recognition, Basler´s dart cam and a state-of-the-art system-on-a-modul  by Inforce. This innovative combination allows Pysense to run computationally intensive facial recognition on a device smaller than a common smartphone. The foundation for this process are high quality pictures. Basler´s dart cam proofed to deliver the most robust picture quality on various occasions at an economically scalable price.

Retail

Demographic People Counting

In addition to traditional visitor counts Pysenses in the entrance area of a shop provide data about age and gender of the prospects visiting. By knowing which target groups visit different stores at different times, your in-store marketing can easily be adjusted to meet their needs and preferences.

Demographic Scanner Data Analytics

Pysenses installed in the check-out area allow us to combine sales data (UPC scanner data) with demographic data. We use this information to identify the most profitable customer groups and to analyze which brands they prefer and how they react differently to marketing activities. By comparing this data to demographic visitor counts from the entrance area of the shop we calculate the conversion rates for particular target groups.

Store Window Performance

Store front windows are increasingly important for presenting a company’s cooperate identity. Moreover they attract the attention of people passing by a store, stop them and finally get them to visit. Hence the window design is crucial to attract desired target groups. Pyramics measures the performance of your window design. In this process we monitor the overall traffic passing by the window, the number of observers looking at it and the number of stoppers, who examine the window design more closely. The duration and frequency of views towards the window gives further insights into the observer’s interest. Additionally we capture information about age and gender and the emotions observers show (laughing, astonishment, anger and sadness).

Advertising Effectiveness of In-Store Displays

Similar to the store window performance measurement, Pyramics measure the Advertising effectiveness of in-store displays. Our sensors distinguish between traffic, observers and stoppers and provides data about the frequency and duration of views towards the display. By matching the time stamps of this interactions with the play list of a digital display the information can be assigned to certain ads running on the display. This allows us to examine the effects of ads on different target groups by running split tests (A-B Testing).

Out-of-Home-Media

Measurement of Advertising Reach

Pysense is espacially usefull to measure the reach of out-of-home advertising. Due to its compact size it can be attached unobtrusively to the media (e.g. a digital displays) for short term measurements. Alternatively, for long term measurement, Pysense can be integrated into the case of the media. It´s only requirement is a common power outlet. The automated data collection enables a continuous measurement without projection errors and takes seasonal variations into account.

Pysense detects both people who are directly facing the sensor and people who pass by sideways. For people facing the sensor frontally it provides an estimation about age and gender. This allows out-of-home media providers to rent their media not only by contact numbers but also by the demographics of the foot traffic passing by the media.

Measurement of Advertising Effectiveness

Similar to media providers, advertisers benefit from the opportunity to rent advertising space which is frequented by a selected target group. Moreover Pysense allows to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

The amount of ad observers divided by the total foot traffic equals the conversion rate. It describes the rate of potential observers whose attention is actually attracted by an ad. Additionally the time observers actually look at a media and the time they spent in front of it (dwell time) provides qualitative insights into their interest. The detection of laughing, astonishment, anger and sadness gives further insights into advertising effects. This metrics can be analyzed taking into account age and gender of the observers. When using Pysense on a digital display time stamps of different ads allow us to match audience reactions to certain spots.

Technologies Used

List of components used in this application, where appropriate with short description/explanation 

• Dart camera captures pictures (Basler dart daA1280-54um)
• Inforce 6501™ Micro SOM  by Inforce to runs the Software
• SHORE Software by Fraunhofer extracts anonymous Metadata
• Anonymous data is transferred to the Pyramics Servers via UMTS.
• Clients can access their data through a Web-Interface or order customized reports.

Pyreport

Managers rely on the right metrics and easy to use analytics-tools to improve their marketing decisions. For this purpose we developed the web-analytics-tool Pyreports. It´s customizable dashboard allows a quick overview about the flow of customers in your store and their ad interactions. To analyze the data in more detail, it offers pre-build templates for the most common applications. In addition users can easily create their own analyses using the intuitive Drag-and-Drop control. Alternatively Pyramics offers APIs to integrate the data into existing systems and weekly PDF reports.

More Information

Website or other information

www.pyramics.com