The PMY Pulse - Bringing Advanced People Measurement and Flow Analytics to the Sporting World

Flow-analytics meets the thrill of live events.

Written by Gary Angel - SVP Analytics and Data Strategy | PMY Group

I’m pleased, excited, and a little bit scared to write that we’ve become part of PMY Group. It’s the culmination of a journey that began more years ago than I’d like and has had more than its share of ups and downs. This has been in the works for a while (long enough that I really haven’t been able to post anything for a few months) and it promises to bring both fundamental change to what we do and also leave much of what we do intact and progressing forward.

Here's the big picture. PMY Group provides technology and intelligence services focused on the sports and entertainment world. PMY clients are pretty much a who’s who of big-time sports and entertainment and they routinely work with clients ranging from huge sporting events like the US Open to top-tier professional sports leagues and teams, to some of the finest stadiums and arenas in the world. Check out their (our) website and you’ll see logos from the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS and a lot more.

It's not hard to see why flow-analytics and people-measurement makes sense for PMY or why I think this is an immensely exciting world for us to become a part of. The most successful vertical for flow-analytics to date has been airports, and even though we focus on retail (and yes, we'll still do retail), we do our share of work in airports. Airports are a natural fit for flow-analytics. They are large, complex environments with significant customer experience challenges, a fairly high-value set of customer experiences, and a number of direct operational applications for people measurement (particularly in queue optimization) that present obvious and immediate benefits. From a business standpoint, they present large targets of opportunity, have been heavily funded with recent infrastructure changes, and tend not to be technology shy.

That’s all good stuff. But it should be pretty obvious that on almost every count the sports and entertainment vertical has the same advantages – often in spades. Live events (a PMY specialty) and large arenas are every bit as complex as airports and drive far more experience. The onsite experience is significantly more valuable. There are a number of direct operational applications (including queue management) that will reward sophisticated flow analytics. And on the business side, the clients present large targets of opportunity, exist within one of the most vibrant and unthreatened verticals around, and tend to be technology enthusiasts. Add in that they carry none of the challenges which make government contracting so consistently painful (strong bias to on-premises, security clearances, convoluted contracting systems, rampant cronyism, etc.) and you have a nearly ideal vertical.

Like most such verticals, though, it tends to be a tight community. Their business and model are unique. So. companies are rightly suspicious that vendors won’t understand or support their unique requirements. This isn’t a mistake. A live event like the US Open is just wildly different than a retail store, a train station or an airport. PMY lives in this vertical. They have the technical support, the boots on the ground, the analytics teams, and the infrastructure to deliver complex technology solutions like people measurement and do it with remarkable speed and quickness. Over the past six months, we’ve worked with them on a variety of applications, and it’s been awesome to see how quickly they’ve learned how to design, set up, go-live and drive analytics from what we do.

Part of the reason for that is that PMY already has some experience in flow-analytics and has built out some technology, product and team that are extremely complementary to us. The work they’ve done has all been around video ML and focused on measuring crowd sizes. We’ve never built or invested in those kinds of capabilities, and they fit perfectly alongside the detailed journey tracking we provide. The PMY team has a lot of experience working with existing camera infrastructure and we’re hoping to take advantage of that to build out increasingly advanced and integrated solutions that combine the best of optical and lidar technologies in a seamlessly integrated solution. Getting to work with a strong video ML team is pretty damn exciting.

And speaking of exciting, there are several other aspects of PMY’s business that I kind of love. Like a lot of people, I’m a serious sports fan. Maybe not quite as serious as I was when I was the typical sports-crazed kid, but I follow every major U.S. sport and if there’s an NFL game on, there’s a better than even chance I’m watching it. I’m not the only one at Digital Mortar who feels that way, and we have some pretty deep fans of global sport too – avid followers of the Premier League, La Liga, and even Formula One. Being involved with the industry is exciting, but it’s also giving us exposure to one of the most fascinating aspects of PMY’s Intelligence Business – working on performance analytics. The growth in metric in sport has been explosive – probably equaling my experience in digital. And you know where a lot of the most interesting developments in performance analytics are centered? In people measurement and around the increasing use of lidar.

My other current infatuation is literally up in the air – integrating drones into people measurement (and, as a corollary, improving current systems for protection from drones). Drones are an incredibly tempting solution to providing people measurement in the live event world. That’s a world where putting physical infrastructure in place is often hard or outright impossible. Yet it’s also a world where crowds and people flow are complex, unpredictable and incredibly important. Being able to put people-measurement in place for a live outdoor event, dynamically move it to wherever it is most needed, take advantage of the minimal occlusion that top-down views provide, and deliver seamless flow-analytics on everything from occupancy to crowd crush to perimeter monitoring and flow velocity is breathtaking. And, yes, PMY has a team that is deeply expert in drone security and air defense, and I’ve already started working with them to integrate what we do.

Becoming part of PMY Group marks an exciting new chapter for us — one that combines our expertise in flow-analytics with PMY’s deep roots in sports and entertainment. This partnership opens up immense opportunities to deliver innovative people-measurement solutions in some of the world’s most dynamic and complex environments. We’ll continue doing what we do best, now with the added support, technology, and momentum that PMY brings.