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I had the opportunity during a recent Big Data Vision Workshop to help a client determine where and how to leverage their wealth of anonymous MAC address data to support the organization’s key business initiatives. A very cool client with a lot of creative people always makes for a successful engagement, and this engagement was no different. But before I dig into where and how your organization might be able to leverage location-centric data (e.g., MAC, beacon, Bluetooth, GPS), let’s review a MAC address. MAC stands for “media access control.” A MAC address is a hardware identification  Figure 1: MAC Address number that uniquely identifies each communication device (e.g., laptop, smartphone, tablet, smart watch) on a network. The MAC address is manufactured into every device and cannot be changed. Figure 1 shows a sample MAC Wi-Fi address for a smartphone. To see the MAC address on your Apple iPhone, go to “Settings” and then “General” and then “About.” You will see something called a “Wi-Fi Address.” Yep, that uniquely identifies that device and enables organizations to uniquely track your device as it interacts with different wi-fi access points (in coffee shops, restaurants, malls, arenas, airports, etc.). Yep, I am officially known to Skynet as OC:D7:46:81:34:98. Now analyzing anonymous MAC address data to uncover device behaviors, propensities and tendencies is not new. This is basically what web companies and e-commerce sites have been doing for years with anonymous website cookie data. What is a Website Cookie?A website cookie is a small piece of data stored in the visitor’s web browser. Every time that visitor visits a website, the browser sends the cookie back to the server to notify the website of the visitor’s previous activities (see Figure 2).  Figure 2: Sample of Laptop Cookies Much like how a MAC address cannot uniquely identify the user (me) and can only uniquely identify the device, websites cannot uniquely identify the user (unless you register on that website, like Facebook) and can only uniquely identify that particular device (laptop). Cookies enable websites to remember visitor current state information (e.g., items added in the shopping cart), record the visitor’s browsing activity (e.g., pages visited) and determine visitor’s behavioral characteristics (e.g., product preferences, engagement tendencies, subjects of interest). These “Visitor Behavioral Analytics” enable websites and e-commerce sites to support the following types of analytics:
MAC Address Analytic ProfilesWe can apply many of the same website analytic techniques to the MAC Address data to provide many of the same benefits as cookies. We can create a detailed “MAC Address Analytic Profiles” for each unique and anonymous MAC address. For example, let’s say that we are dealing with a large transportation port. With enough data over a long enough time period (think years, not weeks), we could derive for each MAC address profile the following information:
The analytic insights gleaned from the MAC Address Analytic Profiles could support multiple use cases including:
MAC Address ExampleFigure 3 shows a sample of what could be done with the MAC address data in tracking travelers and determining their preferences, tendencies and propensities.  Figure 3: Example MAC Address Travel Pattern Note: Figure 3 data and images are mocked up so as to hide the identity of the MAC address and the client (though it does look an awful lot like my travel patterns…) Imagine having this level of insights into the patterns, propensities and behaviors of all the travelers, passengers, guests, players, visitors, students, citizens, etc. for a physical location (e.g., malls, arenas, ports, airports, department stores, campuses, cities). Imagine how much you could “improve the guest experience” if you knew more about your guests’ travel patterns, propensities and preferences. The potential to provide a more engaging and more profitable experience is almost unlimited. The post MAC Address Behavioral Analytics appeared first on InFocus. |
