Data monetization for sports: a true game-changer
During the pandemic, a huge shift to digital fan engagement was amplified across sport as physical attendance became difficult or impossible. Now, as venues reopen, sports organizers must orchestrate captivating events and find essential new revenue streams – all while meeting the significant challenges of ensuring the safety of spectators.
Sports’ golden assets
One important asset is increasingly available to help meet these complex demands – the ever-growing volumes of data collected by sports organizations and partners before, during and after live events. Using this data, we see unprecedented opportunities for sports venues/federations/organizers and media organizations to be the game-changers of sport in this new post-pandemic era.
In combination with data, there’s a set of golden assets in sport that bring rich opportunities for innovators: namely, brand recognition, fan loyalty, plus the stakeholder relationships that exist along the sports value chain – especially those between sports organizations and telecoms, media and tech companies.
Data monetization for sports
At Atos, we’re excited to have been developing with sports organizations and partners a new paradigm and capability to orchestrate these assets to reinvent the business of sport. It’s called data monetization for sports - designed to ensure health and safety, understand and delight fans before, during and after every game, and increase business value at every touchpoint.
Leveraging innovative B2B collaborations, AI-enabled decision-support and an evolving digital ecosystem, fans can be immersed in their favorite sports through ‘phygital’ experiences. Phygital is the fast-evolving new fan experience that combines physical and digital communications, services and interactions. Real-time stadium operations can be uniquely combined with better, richer end-to-end phygital fan journeys.
At Atos, we’re excited to have been developing with sports organizations and partners a new paradigm and capability to orchestrate these assets to reinvent the business of sport.
Smart stadia operations: real-time safety monitoring
Let’s look first at the stadium operations and crowd management part of the lifecycle.
Using mature smart building management technologies and private 5G networks, stadium operators can optimize logistics and crowd management, right through from initial planning through to real-time event monitoring. Using a digital twin of the stadium, they can simulate multiple crowd flow and assess impacts to ensure safety and security.
On match day, by aggregating live telecoms and other data feeds, including 5G-enabled AI computer vision capabilities (as well as GSM/Wi-Fi beacons), they can monitor events in real time and use this intelligence for strategic and operational planning. A digital twin, as ‘3D supervisor’, can analyze crowd numbers and movement for cost-effective, efficient and secure space management.
Enhancing connectivity, cost-effectiveness, and in-stadia experiences
There are many other ways to leverage data within the stadium. With 5G-enabled AI capabilities at the edge, stadia and sports organizations can gather real-time data about visitor demographics, such as age, gender, interests and behavior patterns, as well as getting their consent to marketing/communications. Visitors’ Wi-Fi experiences can be dramatically improved through enablement of one-click connectivity across all group-owned venues for a faster and easier experience.
Insights from data can inform highly targeted and personalized communications and marketing, between events and on the day through live campaigning and digital in-venue advertising. Sports organizations can use and share data to drive cost-effectiveness and offer even more value to their partners and sponsors by enabling them to monetize their content and target advertising specific visitor segments, all via digital channels.
Gamification for live emotions and interactions
To make this new data monetization vision a reality, Atos is working with our own partner ecosystem, pioneering experiences that heighten fan enjoyment, and enable organizers to plan and manage events while growing monetization opportunities for themselves and their partners.
Emotion- and opinion-based gamification, such as live polling, in-app games, rewards and rankings, create meaningful real-time fan interactions that can be monetized. And when visitor data is enriched by capturing their emotions, this creates new ways to approach sponsors with opportunities for hyper-personalized campaigning.
Securing possibilities that are boundless
Seeing the stadium itself holistically in real time opens up new ways of thinking and vital new revenue streams from sponsorship, ticketing, merchandising. Cybersecurity and confidentiality are mission-critical; systems are therefore secure by design and compliant with data privacy regulations.
All the technologies needed for this paradigm already exist. Possibilities for monetizing data before, during and after each event are boundless. Now’s the time to get ahead, be part of a dynamic new space in sport – and become a true game-changer.
By Samia Benrachi, Head of Data Monetization – Telecom, Media & Technology industry
Posted on: June 20, 2022
