Way back in the sweltering days of summer 2007 in “Every Point-of-Purchase is a Window of Opportunity,” The Marketing Consigliere blogged about how the point-of-purchase marketing faction was slowly but surely embracing the net-centric marketing concept. Six months later, one of those companies, VideoMining of State College, Pennsylvania, has made another interesting announcement regarding the launch of a new program called “C-Store Shopper Insights (CSI-1)” in cooperation with several national convenience store chains such as 7-Eleven.

The program’s objective is to better understand the in-store dynamics of key convenience store target demographics. By employing VideoMining’s platform, manufacturers and retailers will be able to gather precision metrics on consumer behavior and therefore be able to optimize their marketing and merchandising practices to boost sales.

Another potentially smart move for VideoMining is a partnership they forged this past autumn with Reflect Systems, Inc. of Dallas, Texas. As part of Reflect Systems’ “Digital Signage Consulting Toolkit,” VideoMining’s platform will allow businesses to have a real-time window into shoppers’ reactions to alterations in store layout and signage placement, which will then allow those business to optimize configuration and messaging of signage.

Envysion of Louisville, Colorado is the answer to a question that was asked in another blog (“The Fog of Piracy War“) from last summer: “How far are we off from permanently installing night-vision enhanced cameras in theaters, and networking them, and actually keeping digital video recordings?” According to their website, Envysion looks “at video from a network perspective and we use the network capabilities of the Internet to make video from lots of locations easily accessible to lots of authorized users.” Yikes… here come the night-vision cameras in the movie theaters…

The Marketing Consigliere has stated before that he especially likes to blog about C⁴ISR Marketing companies based in the region where he lives and works, so he enthusiastically welcomes another player into this small cadre of vendors: Avocado Security of Fairfax, Virginia is rolling a SaaS offering that feeds digital video from existing surveillance cameras and translates the data into actionable business information in a dashboard format. They have targeted retailers, restaurants, entertainment venues, malls, and other organizations that want to monitor and analyze customer behavior.

A great graphic on their website illustrates how they can take the traditional security monitoring interface and transform it into a dashboard with potentially more valuable, cross disciplined information.

Whether this is just marketing “sizzle” or real “steak” has yet to be seen, but of this he is quite certain – Mike and Kevin Shahbazi, who successfully started TrustDigital and exited, could be onto something and have the wherewithal to make it happen. One of the keys to their success will be their ability to deliver relevant, timely and decisive information to marketers through this application – it’s not a security platform; it’s a network centric marketing catalyst.