The company has built two sensors – one for Proof of Display and one for Proof of Audience. Both are designed to work with digital outdoor frames, with the first checking that the correct ads are being displayed and the second scanning the faces of passers-by to provide audience counts and demographic estimates for gender, age and ethnicity, as well as estimates of dwell time, attention and engagement.

Luca Nestola, Taggalo’s CEO, says the technology boasts strong privacy credentials – with all processing of image data done locally, on the device, before a log file of data (without images) is transferred to the company’s servers, to be fed into its reporting platform.

The technology is currently in private beta, with a full commercial launch scheduled for July.

CFO Paolo Guida explained that the growth in digital out-of-home displays has “opened up the door for programmatic, targeted and integrated campaigns”, but a lack of metrics – and a lack of consistency in metrics – is holding the market back.

“Making audience measurement available outdoor is what we are trying to do,” he said – drawing a distinction between the real-time reporting promised by sensor technology like Taggalo’s, and the time-lagged audience data provided by measurement systems like Route. “What we are trying to do is bring the same logic from online media to outdoor,” said Guida.