Haroon Mirza, Director of Business Development, Anonymous Video Analytics (AVA), Intel Corporation, recently sat down with Digital Signage Spot. Intel Corporation is a featured sponsor of the 2011 Scala Connected Signage Conference – Americas (CSC). Haroon is giving a keynote presentation at the CSC titled “Anonymous Video Analytics: What you can measure, you can manage.” The blog was excited to sit down with him and ask a few questions….
What is AVA?
Anonymous Video Analytics (AVA) technology provides a way to obtain detailed, cost-effective audience impression metrics for digital signage networks. With AVA, a sensor attached to a digital sign sends data to face detection software, such as Intel® AIM Suite (Audience Impression Metrics), which logs audience metrics including how long people viewed the sign and their demographics (i.e. age and gender). AVA is completely anonymous — no images or video are recorded, and no personally identifiable information is collected—only statistical audience data is aggregated.
Why is it important to the digital signage industry?
Digital signs represent a growing advertising medium offering many advantages over traditional outdoor advertising, such as billboards and posters. Millions of digital signs are now in place in stores, restaurants, traffic hubs, college campuses, office buildings and many other locations. However, the audience for digital signage is largely unmeasured – compared to other media such as TV, radio, magazines and even other outdoor advertising, there is a shortage of reliable metrics telling us how many people watch them, when, for how long, demographics, etc. Better metrics will enable advertisers to evaluate and plan their purchases in digital signage making it possible for digital signage networks to obtain a larger share of overall advertising budgets, increasing the ROI.
Why Scala?
The integration of Intel® AIM Suite with Scala Ad Manager offers customers a powerful solution to operate their digital signage networks with measurement. Working with an industry leader such as Scala helps deliver AVA technology on a global level through the strong network of Scala partners that have worldwide reach. We believe acceptance of Digital Signage in the advertising mainstream has been slightly delayed by a lack of measurement. Scala’s large customer base using their powerful network and business management tools, and now offering Intel AIM Suite is the total solution the industry has been looking for. Additionally, the Intel® Core™ i5 and Intel® Core™ i7 processors are a great fit to power digital signage networks that are running Scala’s CMS & Intel® AIM Suite concurrently.
Thanks for your time Haroon – hope to have you back again at the Digital Signage Spot!