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Surveillance Cameras Used To Study Customer Behavior
An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review reports on a startup with software used by stores to track, count and log people captured by security cameras. Prism Skylab's technology can produce heatmaps showing where people went and produce other statistics that the company claims offer tracking and analytics like those used online for the real world. One use case is for businesses to correlate online promotions and deals — such as Groupon offers — with real world footfall and in-store behavior."
Target has been doing this for many years; in house. They have had software for years which spots people who move around like a shop lifter and many years before that they kept logs of the parking lot car plates so they could ID a crook from anywhere in the store by following them back to their car. This was not widely known either... now people probably assume the parking lot has cameras but back in the 90s not so much. BTW, they are interested in ID of people by their walking gate and I would be surprised if they weren't supporting such research along with the UK.
Target also has one of the best computer forensics teams in the nation, way better than the FBI and they even do work for the government. All in house; if they didn't contract it out we'd probably not know about it.
I think this story illustrates that the RFID is completely unnecessary.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The Hentai row in the comic book store isn't as private as you think it is.
Have gnu, will travel.
As a marketer I can tell you that we have been doing this in one way or the other for the last 50 years or so ... the only thing interesting here is that they're doing it with more advanced algorithms. This is stuff we had in the basic course of consumer behavior. The only real difference is that today you OFTEN do these studies in person instead of having computers to do it for you. Results and findings will most probably be the same from this as it is from regular observation studies.
Besides, when doing observation studies the point is not to disturb consumers so they are usually done from a surveillance room or such to monitor consumers movements. Marketers are very seldom interested in individual interactions but when consumers do stand out from the norm it's good to have the possibility to interact with said consumer.
I see this as a possible solution for very large shopping centers and their likes but I don't think there's anything special about this thing in particular.