A leading sports league with 30 teams, television viewership of more than 30 million and an average attendance of 18,000 for their games wanted to monetize their fan ecosystem and digitize the fan experience.
Challenges
A sports league of this size has numerous data sources to account for. Our client has customer data coming from 20 ticketing sources, enterprise CRM, email campaigns, Google Analytics, other partner companies and reports. This data includes sensitive information like personal details and interests. So, it is important to anonymize these personally identifiable details before sharing the data with data scientists and analysts.
Advanced data visualization and analytics capabilities are required to channel insights and useful information to the management, support and marketing teams.
This ecosystem with advanced analytics and AI capabilities must assist the client to generate more revenue in the form of ticket sales, merchandising and sponsorships by increasing the engagement of their fan base.
Our approach
We analyzed where AI and business intelligence technologies could be used in the sporting landscape of our client. To monetize the fan ecosystem, our AI solutions would have to constantly add value and richness to the sporting experience. By developing a set of solutions that adds value to management, marketing and fans alike, we were able to meet our client’s expectations. Each of these ecosystems require different analytics and data and these are the list of solutions we delivered to the client to achieve digital transformation in the sports industry.
Our technology solutions to enhance the sports marketing ecosystem
Segment analysis
One of the key capabilities that our system delivers to our client is the ability to create customer segments from behavioral data. Our segment analysis technology enables our customers to create meaningful customer segments according to geography, demographic, behavior and psychographic data. Insights from our customer segmentation analysis can directly impact the merchandise and ticket sales.
Identity resolution
Our identity resolution system ties customer behaviors with unique customer identities. This gives organizations an opportunity to target their customer segment with highly personalized offers leading to higher ROI while improving customer loyalty. In the sports industry, customer data comes from a variety of sources, which includes data from ticketing sources, email campaigns, website purchases and social media. Implementing identity solution can help organizations to tie the information from these disparate sources together to identify whether it is the same customer who is involved in all these activities.
Merchandising
Merchandising is one of the main sources of revenue in the sports industry. Identifying and engaging fans with the right products at the right time can significantly increase the revenue from merchandising. Our advanced analytics and identity resolution solutions helped our clients achieve this.
Our technology solutions to enhance the sports fan ecosystem
Personalized experience
Ardent fan following is the secret behind the success of any sports league. Delivering personalized experiences can retain fans and increase their engagement with the sports league. We tapped into this detail with an initiative called “Fandom” for our sports client. Ardent league fans were identified among the spectators based on their behavior history, and they were rewarded with packages and special offers.
To consider a hypothetical scenario, imagine a super fan with a season ticket arriving at the game. Thirty minutes before the game begins, he will receive an artificial intelligence-powered pregame analysis. When he is about to reach the arena, his phone will buzz with the seat number, which will be based on demand for the game. Upon arriving, he can pay for valet parking and get directions to his seat on the mobile application. He can arrive at his seat with ease, and he can order nachos and drinks from the app, which will be brought to his seat. Finally, he can redeem a few loyalty points as an appreciation for his fandom.
Virtual assistant
Sports leagues have realized how important it is to retain their current fan base by engaging them, while also focusing on adding new fans. To support this need, we deployed AI-enabled chatbots to answer fan queries related to teams, games and schedules. Encouraging this one-on-one fan interaction creates a personalized experience and feeds the system with most popular fan concerns.
In-depth Commentary & Analysis
Our AI-based systems can assist in refereeing and help to evaluate critical gaming moments. Our advanced video and image recognition algorithms can generate instant review of the game footage and help to derive useful insights that can explain each moment. This AI solutions adds up to in-depth commentary and analysis of game play.
Video/Image Recognition
The video and image recognition algorithm is one of our strong suits and has multiple applications across industries. In the sports industry, we have implemented numerous functionalities using advanced image recognition algorithm, which includes:
● Instant highlights created from entire game footage by identifying key moments based on player reactions, audience reactions, audio and few other aspects relevant to the game.
● Search for objects, person or any image in the data warehouse which contains the entire history of league game footage.
Our technology solutions to enhance the sports management ecosystem
Team, venue and ticketing management
Our ticketing solutions involve a single platform through which a league can effectively coordinate all administrative, ticketing, venue and team management tasks. This allows our clients to free their resources from stressful administrative tasks and enable fans to purchase and renew tickets online. This platform also has the provision to manage sponsors and media partners as well.
Sponsorships
Sports leagues that can calculate an ROI for sponsorships using artificial intelligence can show their sponsors the value for their advertising spend. Our video/image recognition AI algorithm can quickly scan through the video content from sources like TV, live streams and online archives, and perform object recognition to track how many times a brand logo, person or any other targets appear over a season’s worth of footage. With such data, sponsors can also able to identify the best properties to sponsor
Popularity forecasting
Popularity trends of sports leagues are of critical importance to advertisers and businesses with an interest in sports leagues. Popularity of sports league in a given season can have large business implications, especially when each team in the league is worth billions.
We pulled data from Google’s analytical tool, Google Trends, which allows users to compare the popularity of search terms over time and across geographical locations. We developed models to forecast the popularity of league games in each season using time series forecasting system.
The purpose of this model is to compare different sports leagues’ popularity to efficiently predict the popularity trend of sports leagues in the United States.
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