According to Hoh Jian Hui, Digital Marketing Executive at Big Screen Media, and writing for Digital Signage Today, retailers are using more effective digital tools, such as facial detection, to attract customers.
Digital signage has a higher recall rate. It can capture more views than traditional displays such as posters and banners. However, as digital signage becomes increasingly used in the retail industry, some retailers quickly realise its limitations. The retail industry is extremely challenging due to fast-changing consumer behaviour and traditional business models can no longer fulfil customer satisfaction, so new technologies should be considered.
What is face detection?
Face detection is a technology that uses machine learning techniques and algorithms to find human faces within a captured video. There are several methods that a face detection system can use to locate faces. One of the most common methods used is to separate facial regions from non-facial regions and the static background. In short, the system is taught to find facial features such as the eyes, nose and mouth.
Limitations of digital signage
Measuring and calculating digital signage ROI can be very difficult. Retail business owners need to evaluate their campaigns’ effectiveness by looking at the ROI. Retailers are also constantly looking for ways to collect valuable customer data such as gender, age and the time spent in looking at digital signage.
Audience measurement
The integration of digital signage and face detection technology offers huge benefits to retail business owners. Audience measurement is one of the benefits.
Audience measurement solutions help to explore and collect measurement data on how viewers interact with the digital signage. With the aid of a face detection system and the camera, the solution can determine the number of viewers, the number of passersby, the total time spent in viewing the content and other useful information. What is even better is that the solution can group the data by age and gender.
By installing and using an analytics tool, retail business owners can access and gain valuable insight. For example, a retailer can identify messages that have the shortest dwell time. He/she can then decide whether to optimise the messages or remove them from the campaign. In short, digital signage with face detection helps retailers to understand more about their customers and track the effectiveness of their digital signage campaigns.
Content optimisation
Another benefit of using face detection technology is content optimisation. Since digital signage with the face detection feature can identify the gender and age group of viewers, retailers can now deliver highly personalised messages in real time.
Imagine you are the owner of a large shoe retail store that sells all kinds of shoes. There is digital signage in your store. You have no idea whether to display the promo video of men’s leather shoes, high heels or children’s footwear.
By using the face detection system, your digital signage can display the promo video of high heels when a female customer is looking at the screen, and it can also switch to the promo video of men’s leather shoes when there is a male customer.
Privacy concern
Any application or system that collects personal and private data can always freak people out. First, we need to understand the difference between facial detection and facial recognition.
Facial detection is used to identify facial features that can help to tell demographic characteristics such as gender and age. Facial detection cannot tell the identity of the person involved. Once the characteristics are identified, the system will store only the data which will then be used by businesses to understand their customers. The system will not store any personal data.
On the other hand, the application of facial recognition is more sensitive because it can tell the identity of the captured person if there is a match with database data. No matter which application is used, business owners should use the collected data only to benefit their customers. Pay attention to any regulation imposed in your country that may limit the use of facial detection in public spaces.
While technology is evolving faster than ever, retail businesses should adapt to change quickly by implementing digital business strategies. Although the future of the facial detection application remains murky due to privacy concerns, we cannot deny the fact that digital signage with a face detection feature can help to improve the retail shopping experience.
This article appears in Digital Signage Today.
