Getting To Know You: Euclid COO Ross Chanin on Collecting Consumer Data at Venues

(Photo: Courtesy Euclid) – Euclid COO Ross Chanin

Ahead of Euclid CEO Brent Franson’s appearance at the VenuesNow Conference (June 19-20),  VN sat down with the data collection company’s COO Ross Chanin  to find out more about its push into the venue industry and how its capturing of data can help facilities better understand their customers towards ultimately providing a better guest experience. 

VenuesNow: When did Euclid start as a company?
Ross Chanin: We started in 2011. The company was founded by Will Smith and one of the co-founders of a company called Urchin, which was acquired by Google and became Google Analytics. The idea was to take Google Analytics and apply that to the offline world. Another way to say it is that we are an offline cookie.  Will comes from the family that invented the modern-day shopping center and he tells stories about they used to hold their hands on the top of a car in the parking lot to see how warm it was and see how long visitors were at a mall.

The aim was to track consumers in retail settings?
The aim was to provide greater intelligence to marketers so they could provide better consumer experiences.

How does it work?
Euclid requires zero hardware deployment on premises. This is applicable for the largest shopping center in the U.S. and the largest stadium in the U.S. This is topical because the team here has spent years building direct integration into the leading Wi-Fi (original equipment manufacturers) and cloud systems. Because Euclid has built these architectures already, we can immediately capture the data from a mobile device, which gives off a unique ID every 30 to 90 seconds, when it enters a venue. Our technology sits on the access points and listens for the device pings. The magic happens when we capture the data.

Can Euclid capture data from every mobile device that enters a venue or only the guests that opt in to Wi-Fi?
We can gather data from every device that is in the geofence we’ve set up whether someone has opted in to the Wi-Fi or not. The device says hello to our identifiers when they enter, but we never identify a guest unless we get permission from that guest to do so.

What data points do you collect?
The email address is the number one data point we collect and tells us who actually came and visited the venue. That allows us to know who our guest is. We also look at things like duration. Do people come to the first or second inning of a game a leave or stay for the entire time? Wi-Fi is far superior to tell us those things than GPS or any other technology that is out there, and it can do this without heavy infrastructure such as beacons.
We can also tell a venue if the guest comes alone or with a family, and because we can appreciate fan-level visits, we can provide increased targeting for sponsors to target relevant content in real time.

Do you collect data on a guest’s movements within the venue?
Our data provides granularity in 10 to 30 meters, location intelligence, and tells us where the guest is within the stadium. This is referred to as ‘zoning.’

Can you track purchases within a venue?
Yes. We integrate with (customer relationship management) and POS systems, and if the customer pays with a card or uses a loyalty program we can stitch those things together. That’s really powerful data.

Once you capture the data, what do you do with it?
We market to that customer. We send ads to phones. We target them for future events. We can push ads to Facebook or Instagram accounts. We are a data-in and data-out company, and use the data as a marketing channel to API into any other system.

You started the company targeting retail stores, such as Joann Fabric and Craft Stores. When did you start moving the system into the venue industry?
We started our push into venues in 2018; it’s a new and exciting vertical for us. The traction has been excellent and fantastic. We can help with ticketing, broadcast rights and even merchandising. What we’ve learned is that whether it’s MLB or NHL or MLS, sponsorships really matter at the venue level. Sponsors are continuing to ask venues for metrics to understand their ROI and we can provide that data.

We also provide real, qualified leads for their sales organizations. If you speak to franchise owners they say that they really know 30 to 40 percent of their actual guests, but the other 60 to 70 percent are unknown. A particular fan might come to two games and be unknown to the venue; the venue operators would love to know who that person is and have the ability to market to them to get them to come to more games. That’s not possible in many circumstances; with Euclid it is possible.

Can you cite a real-world example of how the data would help market the venue?
Let’s say we identify a guest who only comes to marquee games, with high ticket prices. If a venue wants to get them to come to B- and C-level games, the venue can target a fan in real time at the marquee game and offer a discount to the B- and C-level games. For the price of one ticket, the guest can get four tickets. Often, this will make or break a whole season; it’s a big deal.

Do you cross-market?
Absolutely. Let’s say a customer comes to Disney on Ice. We can then market to that customer to come to a family-day baseball game or NBA game. We think cross-marketing across a venue is really potent. Knowing your customers makes this possible to do.

Who ultimately owns the data?
The customer owns the data. Data ownership and stewardship is an important strategic asset for venues to have that is not reliant upon the Googles and Facebooks of the world. It’s a visual digital balance sheet for the venue.

How do contracts with Euclid work?
We have an annual fee; it’s a flat fee.

How do venues access their data?
We have a full enterprise dashboard, that visualizes the data, and the venue marketing and sales force can access that anytime they want. We also integrate with Facebook. We can also integrate into any CRM system.

Can you compare what a guest does at one venue versus another venue across town?
We don’t share the data from one venue with another. But we can tell a venue whether a certain guest is a frequent venue visitor. We can also tell a venue whether a guest is a frequent restaurantgoer or what kind of concessions a guest purchases and then the venue can market to that guest accordingly.

How many customers do you currently have?
We have tens of thousands of clients, spread over 20 countries.

Euclid CEO Brent Franson will appear at the VenuesNow Conference on June 19.

This story originally appeared on VenuesNow.

– VenuesNow Conference