Oliver Schwede introduced a session on analytics measurement and the legal implications of digital signage analytics.
Schwede asked Dannel Gasser of Relevance Analytics “What is the role of analytics in the store?”. Gasser said that if you asked an online retailer not to use analytics, they would say you are crazy, but in digital signage it still is relatively new. Retailers have to measure who is in their store and what they are buying to start understanding. Relevance uses cameras and infrared technology to measure customers entering the store, how people move in the store and the time spent in front of shelves.
Ke-Guang Nguyen-Phuc is COO of Quividi and he explained that the company has technology in face detection. It’s important to count people, check the demographics and see where they are paying attention. Quividi doesn’t identify people, so it’s not face recognition. iBeacons are useful because the customer has decided to allow themselves to be identified (he emphasised multiple time that it doesn’t do “face recognition”). There is a debate about privacy, but the technology to really recognise and identify individuals is not completely there, yet. The detection technology was first used to understand who the audience was for a digital advert. However, the more data you have, the better you can use it. Nguyen-Phuc said that, for example, you can use analytics to predict out of stock shelves etc. There are lots of areas where you can optimise your store by measuring things.
Gasser said that the use of analytics has been gradually increasing.
Thorsten Ihler of Fieldfisher is a lawyer specialising in media law in Germany and he said that the country has one of the strictest legal frameworks for video and that it was originally designed to control surveillance activitities – the idea of recognition was not around when the laws were created. The details of legal compliance can also vary in the different states (L
