Sports Marketing Moves the Ball into the Digital Zone

Innovative cross platform marketing has been part of the Sports marketplace for years. Now, with the ability to leverage social media and partner with a variety of brands, Sports is heralding in a new era of cutting edge partnership and measurement efforts. The recent Promax Sports Media Marketing Summit showcased some of the more ground breaking campaigns from a range of programmers, brands and advertisers. 

Jill Lindeman, PromaxBDA’s General Manager explains, “Our focus is to provide high-level dialogue around the issues, trends and emerging opportunities crucial to success in sports media marketing by bringing together speakers from both within and outside of the sports industry.”

Change is in the air. As much as some successful ventures can be repeated year after year, the advancements of digital platforms such as Shazam and Facebook often lead to an evolution of marketing efforts that not only include these new digital applications but also enable successful and measureable partnerships with a range of brands that almost seem unrelated.  You can view some of the speakers in this video.

Take for example the CBS, Turner, NCAA, Coca-Cola integrated marketing campaign. It has been very successful in the past. Recently some local elements were added and another advertiser AT&T was asked to join the partnership and pool efforts. With digital fragmenting the media landscape, there is an opportunity to forge interesting and successful joint ventures from the most unlikely partners. Even the language has changed as Katie Miller from Coca-Cola Company noted, “We talk of partnerships and joint plans, not sponsorships.” Sales has certainly evolved.

Behavioral research and data is not left out of this evolution. Rich Riley of Shazam spoke of how you can use the Shazam platform to receive information such as competitive scores and standings of games. It brings the billboard to life as the commercials are Shazam-enabled and viewers can interact with products and create a call-to-action. 

Facebook is also involved in leveraging sports enthusiasts through the use of their data. Ashley Bradbury stressed the importance of mobile for this group and made the following recommendations to strengthen a brand’s messaging:

1.       Get on a news feed. It drives return on served ads.

2.       Focus on engagement. Know how your ad looks on a mobile device and create a clear call to action for shareable content.

3.       Use mobile app ads for installs and engagement.

4.       Use your data to target your own customers via Facebook users.

John Ford of SyncSense offered a Nielsen-provable approach to optimizing video content, such as sports promos, through the use of neuroscience.   This tested methodology works on all forms of short form video such as promos, show opens, closes and billboards and improves viewer retention, engagement and call-to-action and has increased commercial pod ratings without changing the creative or the branding.

Nielsen’s Stephen Master explained Fanalytics which includes Fanlinks that match consumption with viewership. It offers clients a glimpse into sports fans’ product purchasing and store visits. In addition, NScore helps answer the question of who is the best spokesperson for your product. You may be surprised.

Sports engenders great loyalty and it tends to be viewed in real time. So it is in a prime position to not only optimize real-time social media connections where fans share their enthusiasm but can also help brands connect with these passionate consumers at a time of greater viewer engagement and involvement.  And it is all measureable via the array of research offerings that track, measure and monetize this passion and engagement across all platforms.

SyncSense In the News

Gary Arlen who hosts a blog on MultiChannel News's site just posted on SyncSense which uses neuroscience principles to help optimize video content. I am one of the partners in SynSense  and want to thank Gary for the great article.

Here it is: 

Neuroscience Tools for Better Tune-In Promos and More

By: Gary Arlen Aug 28 2013 - 3:35am

In your Psych 101 class (or when you started to create PowerPoint presentations), you learned to reinforce messages by coordinating visual and verbal ingredients.  In the neuroscience course, which you probably didn’t take, you would learn how to boost that eye/ear reinforcement even further via “brain synchronization.”

So if you got a job in advertising or promotion, you’d use a tool to optimize the simultaneous impact. Cable networks including TNT, AMC Networks, HBO and We, along with ABC News and NBC News have been quietly testing “SyncSense,” a software tool that makes sure the synchronization is instant. Even a 1/10th- second delay can reduce the impact, says Daniel Fischer, a co-founder of the eponymous company.

Moreover, SyncScore – a measurement system that is part of the company’s service – tracks message recognition.  In a project for AMC, SyncScore identified an uptick of 17% to 36% in recall levels for synched promotions within the 25 to 54 year old age bracket; the major variable was the placement of a synched message within an advertising pod.

Initially, SyncSense is concentrating on tune-in promotions, including on-network video messages as well as program intro segments; those few moments at the top of the hour are crucial attention-getting opportunities while viewers are surfing around to choose a show to watch.
“It improves audience retention during breaks,” Fischer emphasizes, focusing on the company’s primary selling point: retaining viewers.

Tightly coordinating voice/text messages are already a fundamental part of commercials, especially direct response and infomercials.   Fischer, an alumnus of Nielsen, Discovery and Warner Cable, believes that the neural connections can also be used in reality programs, movies, dramas and short-form videos, such as the fast-evolving online video sector.
He and his colleagues, who include John Ford (formerly of Discovery and National Geographic Channel) and Charlene Weisler (an ex-AMC executive),  acknowledge the challenge of introducing a new production tool to advertisers and TV promotion departments that have an established format for producing their video materials.  SyncSense is emphasizing the measurement factor, which is at the core of its own revenue model.

The system has been used on more than 80 shows, ranging from HBO’s “Real Sports” to NBC Nightly News.  SyncScore ratings (developed in collaboration with Nielsen data) show that tightly synched voice/text delivery increases full-show ratings by at least 2.8% and up to 7.4% in the youngest – and most fidgety – age brackets. Fischer and his team are promoting these viewership bumps as a way to drive viewers “more efficiently from promos to programs,” which leads to improved Nielsen results and higher ad rates, as he repeatedly points out.

The company’s patent-pending technology optimizes brain sync, which in turn increases attention.  SyncSense is also exploring other multi-input factors that can increase viewer attention, such as the context of on-screen messages.  Included in this dimension are color, movement, luminance, shapes, patterns and even what Fischer calls “gestalt criteria.”   Collectively, these ingredients can be used in various combinations to trigger those neural sensors that reinforce video messages.
Plug that into your brain next time you’re looking for something to watch.
 

Insights, Meditations and Just Pure Happiness

I spent part of my week last week in the happiest place in the world – Disney in Orlando. I was not exactly in the Disney theme parks though. I was at the annual CTAM Insights Conference. Although no theme park, this year’s conference had a compelling theme – embracing change in research approach, methodology, marketing and even personal growth. 

In Sunday’s opening night dinner, Nat Geo Brain Games host Jason Silva rapped poetic about “Radical Openess.” Alternately described as a futurist, filmmaker, epiphany addict, ecstatic truth lover, techno optimist and performance philosopher, Jason is an evangelist of technology as a form of enlightenment.

According to his website, Jason believes that “the rapid, exponential growth rate of technological development is transforming our world, disrupting established industries and leading us towards a radical transformation in many key areas. There are three overlapping revolutions occurring in biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, all of which game-changers.” I see all three areas impacting how we conduct, analyze and receive research in the coming years. 

Jason’s frenetic talk on the subject set the stage for this year’s CTAM conference where speakers on neuroscience discussed how we can use bio metrics and eye tracking to monitor and gauge content.

Monday’s opening speaker, Shawn Achor from Good Think Inc, took us further along the path of corporate enlightenment. He spoke of a Happiness Advantage which is a modern take on the power of positive thinking. The basic premise is that “75% of our job success is predicted not by intelligence, but by your optimism, social support network and the ability to manage energy and stress in a positive way.” He offered daily exercises to raise our positive thinking for those of us who get bogged down in the stressful minutia of daily living. 

From there, much of the conference helped frame innovative ways to conduct and present research. ESPN’s Barry Blyn gave a welcomed presentation on the value of “research to know not research to show” which points out the intrinsic value of less-than-stellar research results as improvement tools. Negative research results from a study have enormous value – it highlights where things can be improved. Unfortunately there are some executives who only want to hear the good news so it is refreshing to hear that, at ESPN, “research to know” is treated as an opportunity and not as a report card.

A session on neuroscience, which included demonstration on biometric and eye tracking testing, demonstrated how the brain responds to content and how we can interpret these responses to form a more engaging viewer experience.  It could be the next step in content measurement. According to Laurie Kaman from EyeTrackShop,  “Eye tracking and other forms of biometric research will grow increasingly more important to advertisers as they seek to learn more about what consumers are actually seeing, how they are reacting to those stimuli and what they are taking away from those experiences.” 

So where do we think TV and research are headed in the next three years? What are the challenges / changes? I asked a group of attendees and their video’d responses are: 

Kaman believes that “the greatest challenge to television is and will continue to be finding creative, new ways to deliver integrated content that will be relevant to a variety of groups of consumers and that will work together across the multiple screens to further engage those audiences. It's going to become increasingly more important that consumers are able to interact in a meaningful way with that content and with the advertisers that are attached to the content.”

In looking at the industry environment, Cathy Hetzel of Rentrak summed it up: “I think the greatest challenge and also the greatest opportunity for television is ‘change’.  We are moving to a world of accountability and performance based metrics, including advanced demographics about the products that consumer use and the cars they drive.  The opportunity is to target and sell advertising in brand new ways, including branded entertainment, which for the first time can now be measured, but the industry has to embrace the change in order to capitalize on it!”