This is a guest post by Sun Sachs, SVP Product, Design & Engineering at Townsquare Media
We recently completed our first Summer music festival season setting up Estimote Beacons at our largest music festivals over the past three months. This post is intended to be a practical summary of what we learned towards the goal of helping others achieve similar challenges.
Our high-level goals were to help transform the music festival experience by leveraging beacons to deliver useful an engaging features and exclusive content for all attendees. We targeted our largest music festivals for this strategy including Mountain Jam (Hunter Mountain, NY), Taste of Country Festival (Hunter Mountain, NY), Country Jam (Grand Junction, CO) and WE Fest (Detroit Lakes, MN) with a combined total of over 300,000+ attendees and 300+ beacons.
One of our primary use cases was to create iBeacon regions mapped to important landmarks within each festival to deliver context aware notifications and content to all attendees using our festival app. To solve these requirements we needed an efficient way to configure each beacon’s power and advertising intervals along with context specific meta data including GPS location, region name, placement photo and description. Using the Estimote SDK we created a custom beacon configuration app that provided three high-level features.
1. iBeacon Configuration
This interface allowed us to configure beacons on the fly by using a ranging algorithm to determine the beacon closest to the device. Tip: When configuring beacons leave the bag of beacons at least 25 yards from the beacon you are trying to configure. You can also use Flip to Sleep mode to mute some beacons. And if you’re feeling really ambitious you can also construct a faraday cage or bag to house your beacons which will effectively block all BLE signal.
Once the app is connected to the beacon, it displays the full set of available meta data to be configured for each beacon. Here we entered a description of the location, selected the specific region e.g. main stage, tuned the power/advertising settings depending upon the placement, captured the GPS location and took a placement photo for retrieving the beacon at the end of the festival. All-in-all this configuration process only took approximately 2-3 minutes per beacon with most of the time spent doing the physical installation (see installation best practices below).
2. iBeacon Locations
After we completed the installation and configuration for each region we then performed a round of Q.A. testing using our beacon locator feature. This feature provided a mashup of our geofence data from a KML file and the GPS locations for all of our beacons to provide a live view of each beacon’s location within each region. Tip: Depending upon how you are using your beacon GPS data you may want to offset the GPS coordinates from the actual beacon placement. For example, if the beacon GPS data is being used in a live display showing a user’s real-time location you don’t necessarily want to show them placed in the exact location of the beacon e.g. mounted to the side of a tent so offsetting the GPS towards the center of the landmark is a quick fix for this issue.
For QA testing we canvassed the different regions selecting the beacon we were closest to and confirming the proper power settings and placement locations. This detailed view above provided a real-time view of the distance from the beacon, the placement photo and an audible beeping tone that increased in pitch as the device got closer to the target beacon. This feature proved exceptionally helpful for comparing the power/distance level to quickly determine possible interference or placement issues. Tip: When a beacon has a significantly lower power reading than the actual setting e.g. a setting of 50 ft.(-12 dBm) but is only broadcasting at 5ft then there is usually a problem with some physical obstruction that is weakening the signal. In this case you can reposition the beacon, clear the obstruction or increase the power.
3. iBeacon Alerts
For the last portion of our Q.A. we performed a hands-on test walking through the most common pathways for each region confirming that we received a context-based location alert. To do this we created a simple interface for selecting a region, creating a test alert and publishing it to our backend system for our festival app to retrieve on a regular interval. This feature proved especially helpful in not only making sure the high-level functionality was working properly but also to help make some final business decisions around specific context-based alerts. For example it may be more critical for a ticket booth to broadcast 270 feet into the surrounding grounds than other landmarks like food and drink vendors which benefit from a closer proximity based notification. Tip: When testing different regions it may be necessary to first leave the test region and re-enter it again in order to register the iBeacon region change. In extreme cases we also toggled the ranging feature on and off before re-entering the test region to make sure the app region session was fully expired before performing a fresh test.
Beacon Installation Best Practices Installing beacons in multiple locations over the Summer also had the added benefit of refining our process and developing this set best practices below.
1. Install Beacons in the Most Common Direct Path of your Consumers First survey the target area and think about the common pathways of your users. For example, if the goal is to ensure that every user entering a specific area receives a beacon alert then you may be able to achieve this goal easily by simply targeting the entry way(s) vs. attempting to fully saturate the beacons throughout the entire area. For example we’ve covered areas as large as 10,000 sq ft with a single beacon by strategically placing the beacon in close proximity to the only entrance or exit within the target region.
2. Use Obstacles to your Advantage Another efficient technique for installing beacons is to use obstacles that naturally deflect the beacon signal in certain directions. For example placing a beacon on a metal pole will dampen the beacon output behind the pole and direct the signal in a forward direction. Using this technique, obstacles can act like shields to define boundaries and even limit the amount of overlap between different beacon regions.
3. Always Place Beacons 7-9 Feet High This comes straight out of the Estimote installation guide and is critically important. Anything below 7 feet will severely dampen the BT signal in crowded areas due to the water mass of people which greatly diffuses the beacon signals. Tip: Always make sure that you retest beacon placements during the live event as beacon performance tends to vary in real-world conditions especially with large crowds of hundreds or thousands of people.
Installation Gear
If you’re going to be installing a lot of beacons in quick succession I highly recommend putting together a simple gear bag for each of your installers (see photos below).
- Duct Tape (synthetic with no metal fibers e.g. normal duct tape). My favorite is the camouflage pattern found at Home Depot
- Zip Ties (see example photo below for the most secure method)
- 3M Double Sided Tape (great for ceilings and other flat surfaces where duct tape and zip ties will not work)
- Box Cutter (For tweaking or removing original placement)
- ½ Inch Rope & Carabiners (useful for holding of of this gear hands-free)
- GPS hand-held device (useful for capturing GPS when cell reception or connectivity is weak)
Tip: Always use the adhesive sticky-side back on the beacon for safety (in addition to these other options above)
Additional Tips
Perform multiple rounds of Q.A. If you are installing beacons in a location where many of the physical structures are temporary or other elements of the environment are changing on a daily basis then it is highly advisable to perform multiple rounds of Q.A. The best practice that worked for us was to do three rounds of Q.A. which included:
Technical Fine Tuning Q.A. After the initial setup is completed make a full pass tuning the beacon placement and broadcast power settings to further optimize the performance of each beacon. Tip: The Estimote app is also great for this using the list view in the “Devices” section.
Pre-Flight Q.A. Walk through all the areas as a consumer would, casually walking from area to area and confirming if there are any reliability or setup issues. This is where you may discover new areas of improvement or places where additional beacons may need to be added to bolster a particular region.
Live Q.A. Once your installation is live and the environment is as real-world as possible in terms of the volume of traffic, attendees, etc. walk through the area similar to your pre-flight Q.A. and confirm if there are any issues. Typically this is the part of the testing where we would most likely see issues with the power/distance settings in some areas since crowds can dampen the performance of the BLE signal. Admittedly it’s a bit challenging to remain inconspicuous while walking around holding up an app and looking at the sky. Tip: if anyone asks what you are doing just say that you are testing the Wi-Fi. Nine times out of 10 this will satisfy them.
Study the Live Experience
Perhaps my most favorite thing to do once all of the beacons are setup is to camp out in an area just downstream from a key beacon placement and study how people respond to the context-based alerts and content delivered from the app. For example if your intention is the ensure that an attendee sees a particular offer at just the right time you can observe and make adjustments to how soon they need to receive the alert in order to allow for enough time to look at their device, read the alert and still be near the target area.
The Data
Across our live events we realized a significant increase in the number of meaningful touch points for our attendees delivering more than 50,000 individual alerts at the right time and in the the right context. The alerts varied from public service announcements like storm warnings to discounts and special offers to exclusive content delivered immediately after a performance. We also garnered a much higher level of engagement per user with our mobile event app with an average of 6+ screens visited per session. Top screens included our festival alerts and real-time map features powered by our beacon data.
Future Use Cases
This first year of beacon usage was a fantastic learning opportunity for our company and a way to deliver enhanced services to our consumers and attendees. Next year we are planning on expanding these capabilities in fun and creative ways for our consumers taking advantage of some of the new indoor proximity based solutions as well as the real time beacon data to entertain, provide context and hopefully deliver more meaningful moments of serendipity powered by this innovative technology.
Sun Sachs, SVP Product, Design & Engineering at Townsquare Media