Promote my brand while having a platform running in the background
Metric Media
By City Weekly Staff
By the flip of a switch, the world was irrevocably changed by the internet and the technologies that came with it. As businesses rely more and more on digital services to promote their brand, Metric Media provides the analytical tools for those companies to target their ideal audience. Peter Van Dyke, CEO of Metric Media, explains how his Utah-based company is helping local businesses adapt to the digital age.
Q: What exactly is Metric Media and how was it conceived? Peter Van Dyke: Metric Media is about bringing big data to the little guys. We provide high-end tech to small business locations and analytics data which makes sense for them. We provide them this data through our interface on a simple platform. In the form of kiosks and screens, we have embedded cameras, just like a phone and laptop have. All of them take in data points businesses never had before such as how many people entered their business, how many customers are male or female, how tall or short, age groups between them—young adult, adult, senior—and their demographic. On top of that, on the outerface, a business can promote their brand while having our platform running in the background and be able to pull up the data. That's the product and the core of Metric Media. In a nutshell, it's bringing big data to the little guy and small businesses.
As far as myself, it's been a concept of mine for the last couple of years with a big push in the last year to put our product in the market. We're making our push this summer with some of our units—we have about 1000 units coming throughout the year. At Metric Media, we hone in on the metric and data aspect, but also the media aspect. By providing the media aspect, we provide data our customers never had before in media creation. We can touch up websites, submit photography, all sorts of media content. We've even done drone services before when we've been asked to do so.
Q: What are the benefits of small businesses using analytic tools? A lot of our analytics do heat sense mapping and emotional expression tracking. If you took someone walking into a cupcake shop, for example, we can tell if that user is having a positive experience, negative, just a passer-by, if something caught their attention for a few seconds or a minute, et cetera. If the content a business displays isn't working that well, it needs to be changed. Is your customer experience a positive experience a negative one? Is it a song that's playing that makes everyone's mood shift? If you played something different, did people's emotions change to an upbeat one? It's taking what you're already doing and providing more data points. It increases the overall experience and putting more value to your customer experience and tweaking that experience to the data provided.
Q: Is it challenging to explain those benefits to your clients? What are some other challenges? We love to be able to show what our product does rather than explain it—we try to bring it in and show it. People may think it's too technical of data that they need, or don't need. But being able to show them is huge. We make it really simple. We've simplified the interface to make it easy to read for our customers.
Another challenge is tracking with facial analytics. We've embedded the camera in all of the units so you can't even tell they are there. People think we may be doing something negative with tracking, but there isn't any collection of personal data. It's all just general categories of data points with specifics, like I mentioned before.
Q: Digital technology is always adapting. How do you keep up and keep evolving your products? For everyone that is scared of technology, there's another that love it as well. We've kept up with the cool aspect and keep up with latest and greatest technology in the digital realm. While the facial analytics may be a little scary and hard to explain, we've embedded it and people love the sleek look and people know their business need to go digital. We make sure our products appeal to that audience for their benefit. We also try to keep up with industry trade shows and where the technology and market is going, so we're always change. We also have a really innovative crew that is passionate about what we're doing. With that team, it allows us to stay on top of the trends of the industry.
