When it comes to out-of-home and experiential marketing, measurement has long been a concern. We’re constantly pushing for better measurement and to close the loop in order to track attribution for our clients. One thing we’re really excited about is the AdBeacon. It’s an easy “plug and play” solution that helps us count how many people visited the brand experience, and so much more! With the AdBeacon, we can provide our clients better data for every campaign.

From the masterminds at AdMobilize, the AdBeacon is a camera that delivers impressions, views, dwell time, age, gender and emotion metrics during an experiential marketing campaign. It has anonymous facial detection, designed for audience measurement.

Our ability to measure experiential marketing campaigns easily and effectively is a huge selling point for our clients. The AdBeacon, paired with consumer data capture, social media analytics and distribution or redemption rates, helps to paint a very clear picture of who was impacted by the campaign.

The AdBeacon detects faces within a 53-degree horizontal field of vision and a 40-degree vertical cone of vision, and with a 26-foot range.

“Most metrics are between 90 and 95 percent accurate,” says Mike Neel of AdMobilize. “Gender is usually very accurate, and age range is usually plus or minus seven years.”

Neel, who joined AdMobilize in 2014 as one of its first full-time employees right out of college, now heads up marketing and sales across all offices and regions. Founded in 2012, the company currently has a team of 35 in four offices: Miami, Colombia, Brazil and UK. AdMobilize focuses on holistic data collection infrastructure, and the team builds hardware and develops software in-house. The main use cases of AdBeacon include providing data for out-of-home advertising, retail and digital signage verticals. However, their overall vision is geared toward the ‘internet of things,’ specifically the data and applications of that data.

“My favorite experiential marketing example is from a Coca-Cola activation,” says Neel. “A few of us drove seven hours from Miami to Tallahassee in the middle of the night to set up the AdBeacons. We used an array of AdBeacons around their 20-by-20 event area. We even got as granular as to give specific data for each ‘station’ within the event. It was a long two days, but it was worth it to see the data at the end of the day. The post-campaign report exceeded the brand’s expectations.”

Photo courtesy of AdMobilize, demonstrating the AdBeacon set-up on a Coca-Cola activation executed by Havas Sports & Entertainment.

CEO Rodolfo Saccoman was quoted in a recent DPAA article: “Clients utilize our technology with three main perspectives; capture, interactivity and dynamic.”

Over the summer, we activated a food truck tour for one of our clients. In addition to overall audience measurement, the AdBeacon helped us realize the differences between our tier one stops (major events) and tier two stops (smaller events, guerrilla marketing locations and retail stores). For example, the larger events had an average daily impression rate of 1,205 compared to 875 at the tier two stops. But the smaller stops saw a 3,400 percent jump in dwell time, meaning the consumer engagements were much, much longer.

Being able to provide our client with that level of detail was rewarding. We could report with high confidence the number of daily impressions, that the audience skewed male and that we interacted with mostly adults aged 31 to 60. We also reported on other data based on the campaign’s goals, but the audience profile was an important part of our post-campaign recap.

Neel says, “We believe the AdBeacon is a must-have for all experiential campaigns. One of the bigger challenges that these campaigns face is lack of data. Brands now expect – and sometimes demand – more accountability and understanding of how the activity of the campaign influences their overall objectives. Without data, this is very difficult.”

He adds, “The marketer would never be able to truly quantify the entire campaign without the use of primary data collection services such as AdBeacon. Sampling and manual counting are just not enough. With AdBeacon, marketers can collect their own real-time data, 24/7.”

We are proud of the results the AdBeacon helps us deliver to our clients, and we look forward to measuring more campaigns with this technology in the future.

Ready to try experiential marketing? Give us a call today.