Look Ma, No PC: AdMobilize’s Audience Measurement Running On Samsung Smart Displays

February 17, 2021 by Dave Haynes

One of the minor but persistent concerns about using the smart digital signage displays now marketed by most LCD manufacturers is that the embedded computing devices didn’t have the power to meet the demands of some projects.

Exhibit A has often been that a “smart” commercial display could not play out media AND handle the real-time processing for the numerous computer vision-based audience measurement platforms that feed into signage.

Now Miami’s AdMobilize has figured out how to run its AI-driven audience intelligence software on Samsung’s System-on-Chip displays. The integration works on displays that run Tizen 4.0 or higher operating system.

The big deal here is that it removes significant capital costs, as a digital sign that’s running content does not need a separate PC to run the analytics software. Per display node, that would typically strip out at least $200, and often more.

This development is first-of-its-kind in lightweight AI technologies and a major step forward to increasing the adoption of such solutions, says AdMobilize, in its PR. End users can also run any supported CMS (Content Management System), such as MagicINFO, in parallel to AdMobilize software running on the Tizen OS.

The solution will produce anonymous analytics around audience impressions, demographics and more, all in real-time. These groundtruth metrics are crucial to the continued success and growth of DOOH programmatic advertising around the world. AdMobilize already has integrations with mutual partners such as LiveDOOH Signkick and TPS Engage, who also support Samsung Tizen and MagicINFO CMS.

“Working with AdMobilize to develop audience measurement natively for Samsung Tizen OS will provide our customers and partners with built-in capabilities that lower the total cost of ownership while allowing them to monetize their visual displays,” says Paul Kim, Vice President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics.

“Building our AI into Samsung’s digital signage powered by Tizen is the next evolution of the AdMobilize solution set,” says Rodolfo Saccoman, Founder/CEO, AdMobilize. “One of the cornerstone reasons of why large scale clients chose us is our ability to innovate years ahead of the competition, and  this deep integration brings immense value to our clients and end-users buying Samsung digital displays. This development is a major milestone in the world of lightweight AI and touchless technologies.”

Samsung does have its own analytics software as an add-on to magicINFO, its own CMS. But the analytics capabilities are more focused around store performance and traffic, as opposed to audience insights.

This development is interesting. I don’t know the fine details or mechanics of this, but the proposition of having the ability to activate audience measurement just by adding a USB camera and subscribing to AdMobilize would be appealing.

I also don’t know if the processing is constrained or throttled in some way, and perhaps not offering the full capabilities or snappiness of running it on a separate box with an Intel i5 inside, but I suspect the needs of network operators vary.

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