Crowd Identification

Who are the guests in the skyboxes?
Who’s tuned in to your TV show right now?
What is this audience most likely to buy?
How can I tune my advertising in real time?

Media audience members (television and radio for example) are by definition anonymous participants. In most cases the broadcasting entity has no idea who is in the audience of a particular media program at a particular point in time. With this information being extremely valuable post broadcast and also during the broadcast for audience analysis (for example, to control dynamic ad insertion and customize the media content for the current audience), knowing who is in the audience at a particular moment has increasing importance.

Tickets for venues such as concerts and sporting events are often sold in groups, gifted, or otherwise transferred from the original purchaser. Tickets for movies are sold anonymously. In almost all such instances, other than a very few attendees such as season ticket holders (who may have sold or given away their seats anyhow), the venue and promoter has no idea who is attending the event at that point in time. With this information being extremely valuable post event and also during the event for audience analysis (for example, to control dynamic ad insertion in previews and variable ad content on video billboards and jumbotrons within the venue), knowing who is in attendance and watching at a particular moment have increasing importance.

Crowd Identification can answer these questions

Event attendees are prompted with an offer in exchange for a mobile phone text message. Offer examples could include, for example, a chance to win an upgraded pair of seats or concession coupons. Message payload for the text-ed message can be variable or even none at all. In the case of an event with assigned seating the message could request that the seat number of the message sender be text-ed. Now there is not only a mechanism for prize delivery (finding the winner of the upgraded pair of seats) but one can identify exactly where offer respondents are sitting. In the case of broadcast media, text messaging is already a common mechanism for receiving information from the audience (voting for a favorite show participant for example).

When the SMS Text Message Receiver Module receives a message, the phone number from which the message was sent will be passed along to the Reverse Directory Lookup Module. This module will use one or more national mobile phone number directory databases to determine the name and address information (as little information as a zip code can be effectively worked with) of the sender. This information is then passed to the Consumer Data Query Module.

The Consumer Data Query Module will use the name and address information to query one or more national consumer databases that contain demographic, location, lifestyle interest, and even known purchasing motivators of the person sending the text message. This information can be sent to a Data Store, along with any message payload, for post event audience analysis or passed along to an Instant Action Module.

The Instant Action Module will contain logic for instant real time analysis of the consumer data that can be used, for example, to determine the “level” of prize a respondent should receive. It can also contain logic and an interface to external systems that can determine what advertisements should be playing on the previews, video billboards and jumbotrons to target the collective demographics of the audience currently in the seats.