Immersive Labs Helps Drive Pepsi’s SXSW Zeitgeist

March 23, 2012 by Dave Haynes

New York-based Immersive Labs is back from what sounds like a very cool few days working with PepsiCo at the massive SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas, which I am thinking I need to start attending.

The startup – which does a face pattern detection-ad serving and analytics mash-up for digital OOH – was invited to work with PepsiCo’s Digital and Social Media business unit on a theme of the intersection of digital and analog. The discussion throughout the show was BIG DATA and how it impacts the customer experience.

“Since our focus is gathering data in the analog (aka real) world and adapting content to that data,” says Immersive COO Jill Miller, “PepsiCo felt we were a great fit for this activation. For the event, we used our adaptive face detection platform CARA as part of their data collection. We ran ads for several PepsiCo brands and measured key points of information. These stats were  fed into PepsiCo Zeitgeist, a real-time ticker of social media activity around SXSW.”

There were five stations set up around the Austin Convention Center and Immersive collected information such as gender, age, dwell time, glances, top ads and busiest time of day. The stations were also showing how adaptive ad technology works, and serving ads. The Immersive tech detected 44,000 or so faces during the event, including some guy with Jill behind him, fishing for attention from Mashable.

PepsiCo has been using  Zeitgeist since 2009 to monitor the pulse of the interactive, music and film conference in Austin, by mining SXSW social media conversations and presenting emerging trends.

Here’s an infographic on what was gathered: