I was just standing in Whole Foods an hour ago, watching the creative on one of the Marketplace Station screens installed in the Oakville store (outside Toronto) and busily throwing the analytics off of their standard numbers by lingering for minutes, not seconds.

The screens in the store, along with those in another Toronto location, are running BroadSign-powered (there was a time when that warranted a disclaimer ... hmmph) playlists and are now sharing information with the audience tracking data being picked up and crunched by CognoVision's cameras and software.

I saw a demo on how this worked a few weeks ago, and trade shows and other stuff had pushed back news of this until a press release came out today:

CognoVision Solutions Inc., a leading provider of automated audience measurement and targeted marketing solutions, and BroadSign, a market leader in Software-as-a-Service solutions for managing digital signage networks, have integrated their reporting modules into CognoVision's Anonymous Impression Metric (AIM) Analytics system to offer a first-of-its-kind joint application that measures campaign effectiveness based on audience numbers, viewer behavior, and ad-triggered actions.

The analytics stuff is fascinating anyway -- you get a clear, clear sense of how little time content has to engage -- but by sucking in data extracted from a digital signage software platform's playlogs, you can really get granular in terms of how many people saw what, when and for how long. 

CognoVision's AIM system processes the data feed from the optical sensors embedded in the screens and generates anonymous viewership statistics. The aggregated data is then correlated with proof-of-play reports from the BroadSign network management software using CognoVision's web-based analytics tool, which is consistent with the Out-of-home Video Advertising Bureau's (OVAB) Audience Metrics Guidelines. The reports generated in real time provide insights regarding what specific ads were seen, how long each ad was watched for, and viewer gender breakdown for each ad. 

Now this level of detail, on normal ad-driven networks, is more than enough to make a media planner's head explode. It's more than they want to know.

But for Whole Foods and their screen network partner, they get a really interesting look at how these screens are working in the environment, the changing profile of the audience, and what makes people look and keep looking.