A 30-second advertising slot during a sports broadcast may seem like a short space of time but, for the activating brand, it can make a huge difference when it comes to driving awareness growing their customer base.

But despite this importance, sponsors have historically had a hard time determining just how much in-game branding is worth.

With teams and leagues only able to provide a finite amount of physical sponsorship inventory in their venues, many rights holders have turned to the digital world to unlock new revenue streams and activation opportunities.

The National Hockey League’s (NHL) digitally-enhanced dasherboards (DEDs) program uses virtual advertising technology to tailor branding on the protective barriers that surround the rink for local, national and international game broadcasts.

But not every league and team has embraced digital advertising in the same way the NHL has. Some don’t even provide information about the amount of time a brand has appeared in the broadcast or how visible their logo was as a proportion of the screen.  

Step forward Visua, which works with Vision Insights to provide brands with measurement metrics to understand the value and impact of their sponsorship. This allows advertisers to optimise and understand the value of their spend, while rightsholders can extract more revenue by providing partners with greater insights into the effectiveness of a campaign.

“There is a lack of knowledge about what can actually be achieved today,” says Franco De Bonis, marketing operations director at Visua. “The level of data, the level of granularity that brands can get is not really understood.

“So, they flounder in that grey area, thinking ‘We’ve spent this, the only thing we can do now is look all the way over here and figure out if our sales went up’.

“There’s a lot of space in between and a lot of actions that you can take to improve your efficiency and efficacy of your sponsorships.”

Transparency and data-driven metrics

Visua’s technology analyses every frame of footage from every US major sports league, identifying sponsorships. It then segments each image to determine why a particular piece of inventory has come up on screen in the context of the game.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used identify brands on screen, with the technology able to understand over time which specific brands will appear for certain sports. It will then generate data such as exposure area and the total duration of air time where a logo was visible.

Even players and objects the brand appears on are tagged, providing further information about which athletes and surfaces generate the most value for any asset in any game.

“Our approach is fully transparent because every single frame is analysed,” De Bonis explains. “There are no assumptions, there is no sampling of the data, every frame is analysed. That means every detection is down to the millisecond of time that you get.”

Visua combines video footage of each detection with data such as duration, logo size and a ‘confidence score’ that covers the visibility of the detection, into a package. This package is sent to Vision Insights, which then creates exposure metrics for its brand clients to view and evaluate. Brands have access to a whole season’s worth of data, allowing them to measure exposure on a game-to-game basis and compare placements, or aggregate them across the entire season.

How AI can help measure the value of sponsorship

As the technology advances, so does its capability to measure value. Visua’s platform can measure to the exact millisecond a brand appears on screen and the amount of space on a broadcast that a logo can take up. Visua also exposes the clarity of the branding from the perspective of an uninformed fan, and whether the algorithm can recognise a logo or not without making any assumptions.

Similarly, it is also possible to examine visibility factor for how much of a brand needs to be shown before it can be recognised by a viewer. Positioning on-screen, and share of voice, which delves into the value a brand has when sharing the screen with others, are other metrics De Bonis mentions that Visua and Vision Insights can uncover for brands and rightsholders.

“Those are the kind of important metrics that can now be brought out, especially when you bring it down to the millisecond of detection,” De Bonis notes. “Because we process all 30, or even 60, frames per second in videos, we’re not assuming that a logo has been there the whole time, despite being in frame one and in frame 31 within a broadcast, whereas companies can only do that process at one frame per second.

“In a fast-moving sport like ice hockey, in one second, you can be from one end of the rink to the other end. We get right down to that millisecond of data. It [The logo] might have been in, then out, and then back in again.

“So, you get this really accurate level of data of what was visible, combined with all this other stuff of clarity and prominence and share of voice and so on. That’s essentially what’s possible these days, once you start analysing it with this level of detail and granularity.”

Transatlantic lessons on commercialism

North American sport, De Bonis says, is ahead of the game when it comes to this kind of visibility and measurability. He says European brands do not ask for the same level of insight about their exposure, whereas the greater diversity of inventory in the US mean there is great interest in comparing the relative value of different types of advertising, such as position on a shirt.

Virtual advertising, such as the NHL’s DED, is also much more common whereas European events are still using analogue methods such as literally painting the field.

This difference in attitude, De Bonis suggests, may stem from how concerned European teams and leagues can be with having too much branding on their broadcast.

“In Europe, it’s almost seen as crass to have too much branding,” De Bonis says. “But if you embrace this virtual insertion of stuff, it allows you to expand the exposure that brands can receive while not crossing that line of crassness.

“We don’t want to put a logo on everything, but if you can rotate those logos out at points throughout the broadcast and even for different regions, you can actually make really informed decisions. If you have the right data, you can start to really put two and two together and say, ‘Okay, this asset delivers huge value, and so we really need to make that a virtual insertion so we can leverage that across different regions in different ways’.

“I think it all comes together based on when you have the right data, embrace technology and move forward with it. When you think about regionalisation, you can just achieve so much more.”

This lack of flexibility among rights holders and reduced ability to measure different types of exposure means European sport could be missing out on significant revenues. Indeed, Major League Baseball (MLB) can earn US$700,000 for a digitally-imposed graphic lasting just 30 seconds during the World Series.

“Different vendors use different methodologies to translate duration into value,” Webb explains. “We partner with aggregators of media spend, so home team sports for the regional networks and guideline for national broadcast.

“We know how much brands are spending to have commercials run in that specific game, and we use that dollar amount to translate our durations into that sort of gross value. This is why our gross value is called the equivalent commercial value, which we find is a very easy methodology for agencies and brands to understand, and it’s in like terms.

“So you’re spending this much across your advertising campaign. This is the TV exposure value measured in exactly the same way.”

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