The Measurement Minute

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Using LP cameras for people-tracking seems like a slam-dunk. After all, you already have the cameras in the ceiling. But there are good reasons why most measurement implementations end up using dedicated IoT measurement cameras. And those reasons include coverage, privacy and – most surprisingly – cost.

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Lidar may be best known for its application to self-driving cars, but it’s also a powerful people-tracking technology. Lidar’s great coverage area and ability to function in any lighting conditions make it very popular for security applications. But it can be used for any type of people-movement tracking and it has some unique advantages when it comes to doing both merchandising analytics and full journey tracking of shoppers in the store.

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

To get the new year off to a good start, Tilman Schwarze of Hella and I are doing a free webinar covering the key applications of people-sensing technologies. It’s really compelling content with lots of video showing you how video sensors “see” the world and how the data they generate gets used to manage occupancy, improve people-processes, test & measure store merchandising and improve lines and queue management. The Webinar is on Jan. 19th at 9am Pacific. I hope you’ll join…

 

Register now!

 

 

 

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

Attribution is one of the most challenging endeavors in marketing analytics. It’s a problem I failed at a few times back at Semphonic and EY – and it’s the primary focus for Scott Konopasek and Mint Measure. In this 20 minute interview, Scott and I talk attribution. Why it’s hard. What’s missing in the market. And whether a more focused and less ambitious attribution approach can pay dividends. If you’re interested in or thinking about attribution problems, I think you’ll enjoy Scott’s takes…

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

Bluetooth is a go to technology for Associate Tracking. It’s easy to implement and deploy and provide continuous tracking at the equivalent of 3 FPS. That’s well short of 30 FPS with camera but more than good enough for almost every real world application. On the other hand, BLE tracking isn’t nearly as positionally accurate as camera. Given those capabilities, what can BLE Associate tracking do and when can’t it do the job?

 

 

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel

 

WiFi based electronics never worked very well for labor tracking, but Bluetooth, particularly as a supplement to camera, can work very well indeed. The biggest problem with camera-based people-processes is that cameras don’t identify individuals – so if they lose sight of them (even for a second), they lose consistent, individual level tracking. That’s a problem BLE can help solve.

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Camera and Electronics work very differently and have fundamentally different characteristics when it comes to people-tracking. Oddly, they turn out to be almost perfectly opposite in what they do well and poorly. In practice, that means that choosing either technology will leave significant gaps in the measurement system. So why not combine the two?

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Electronic Tracking is one of the easiest and most cost-efficient methods for doing shopper geolocation tracking. But how much measurement does it actually deliver? In this podcast, the Minute evaluates Wifi, Bluetooth and Mobile App tracking vs a perfect measurement system (full population tracking, fine-grained time granularity, exact positioning, full-journey tracking, Associate identification, shopper characteristics, easy deployment, low cost of ownership, etc.).

 

The bottom line isn’t necessarily pretty. Most flavors of electronic tracking fail pretty hard on some of the most important measurement goals. On the other hands, electronics does pretty well when it comes to the big-picture, flow stuff.

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Camera may be the most popular people-tracking technology, but electronic sensors have a role to play too. Electronic sensors listen for electronic probes (Wifi or Bluetooth) and position them using either triangulation or ML techniques. This allows them to track the position of a device (and hence a person) over time. Wifi signals are most commonly used to track shopper smart-phones. Bluetooth (BLE) signals are the electronic signal of choice for tracking Associates and equipment (like grocery carts). Mobile Apps actually straddle this line and can sometimes be used for both or either.

 

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel

 

Every now and again the Measurement Minute goes off topic and what better time than after an election. Professional analysts get their own election postmortems these days, and lots of folks have been piling on Nate Silver’s 538. They got the same treatment for wrongly predicting Clinton a 70/30 likely winner in 2016 as they did for rightly predicting a Biden victory (90/10 likelihood) in 2020. That 2016 criticism was wrong and unfair. But in 2020? Not so much. The Measurement Minute considers whether polling is really accurate enough to support the uses Silver and his team are putting it to and based on 2020 at least, the answer is probably not.