AI is the topic buzzing through sports sponsorship meetings this year. Organizations everywhere — in every sport — are using AI for sports sponsors looking to activate passionate fan communities through digital and social content.
Artificial intelligence technology is a content supercharger. It enables larger volumes of personalized content delivery — faster and with the highest confidence in accuracy. With it, sponsorship teams finally have the means to solve their most pressing challenge: “How do we generate more partner value and revenue?”
Many organizations share sponsor-filled videos and photos on their owned digital and social channels. Or they give it to their athletes to engage with fans on their social accounts.
That activity is table stakes in sports today.
So why stop there?
Think about all the other key stakeholders in your ecosystem who can share your digital media. In particular, don’t miss out on the value lift your team or league could offer to corporate partners. And the revenue you can realize from that. Also, consider the increased exposure you could get for your property and athletes simultaneously when your content gets shared outside your direct fan channels.
Bring your sponsors into the action with AI — they’re demanding nothing less now. Give them their AI-tagged branded digital content to share and reap the benefits directly.
Sponsors Love Getting Digital Content
More sports properties worldwide are already providing sponsors with seamless access to the original photos and videos gathered at every game day, practice and event. This activity has many benefits for these partners, including:
- More consumer reach and engagement. Regardless of market or region, brands recognize that short-form media is particularly crucial for connecting with Gen Z consumers. These fans value authenticity and overwhelmingly use social media to view sports content.
- Fewer production costs. What better way for your partners to fill their campaigns, tell their brand stories and build exposure than with original, authentic digital content they didn’t have to create through an agency or production team?
- Less licensing complexity. Getting your great game, athlete and event content showcasing their logos and marks helps sponsors in another way: They save the cost and complexity of finding and licensing images and videos to use.
- Deeper brand affiliation. This one is big. Brand affiliation is one of the most important things sponsors want beyond impressions, engagement and cost savings. When sponsors use a team, athlete or league’s content featuring their brand on their own channels, particularly digital ones, it’s the most valuable association. And audiences notice.
Partners love to support and align with your sport and property using content within their own promotional outlets. They can cement this true partnership, boost efficiencies and garner more goodwill with fans.
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But Getting Media to Sponsors in Real Time Is Challenging
Sponsors want to get their relevant digital media quickly and easily so they can ride all the gameday momentum and peak fan interest, too.
Yet gathering, sorting and routing large volumes of brand-filled videos and photos in real time to multiple partners can be a massive undertaking. This challenge is particularly burdensome for stretched digital teams. They have to get content to many internal and external endpoints on game day. And that delivery must happen while a game is still in progress.
To maximize partner revenue and value, sports teams and leagues need to do all this without any blockers. Getting quick access to sports organizations’ content branded with their logos is a big hurdle today for sponsors. So, properties that can solve this challenge for them will enjoy more investment for longer.
Luckily, AI technology for sports sponsors is here right now to do that.
Upsell Sponsors With More Content Access
AI for sports sponsors tech helps your property’s teams create customized, partner-specific photo and video galleries. And it automatically populates them with these logo-filled assets.
Only photos or videos with the relevant logos prominently featured get identified and delivered to each partner’s gallery. These auto-curated portfolios can be segmented by event, product, location and more. So staff can focus on other pressing gameday tasks.
AI tagging ensures the photos and videos are easy to search for and download. And they can be distributed immediately to your partners and staff through a browser-based portal or mobile app.
Giving your partners the ability to leverage this media opens the door to deepening their relationships with and investments in your property.
Here’s How It Works
You can give sponsors direct access to digital media showcasing their product or service “in action” from games or training days through shared galleries for their use.
For instance, AI for sports sponsors can identify images showing a bat, stick, racquet or ball used in a tournament-winning moment. Similarly, it can showcase footwear, recovery equipment, performance drink brands, and more.
This capability positively associates their brands with elite performance and victory. And it attracts consumers looking for similar success. One sports league shares content in this way with its equipment partners. They can access action-shot images showcasing their tech-driven sports gear on the field.
AI can curate these assets, which can be used for commercial purposes with some exceptions. They’re best aligned with endemic sports partners. That’s because they fit organically within gameplay or practice.
Suggested Partner Framing
You can offer content access to any partner for a slight increase in their deal (1-10%) or a flat fee. For in-action shots, sell them as a standalone item. Fees depend on the anticipated total partner deal size and the anticipated prevalence of authentic action opportunities.
AI for Sports Sponsors: Deliver Media Faster With Confidence
Sports organizations are using AI-powered content automation platforms like Greenfly to tackle gameday delivery challenges and provide deep sponsor content access.
Greenfly +AI Vision manages the real-time analysis of your collected media assets. This technology automatically identifies the contents of every video and photo in the context of a specific scene.
This scene could be a game-winning celebration or a scoreboard and the subject(s) within it — such as players, using their team kit and jersey number combined with facial recognition. It can even identify athletes when facial recognition isn’t possible. For example, when they’re wearing helmets or another player is in the way.
Most importantly for your sponsor staff: AI can recognize the elements beyond players with real monetary and promotional value. These elements include partner logos. AI identifies marks in background signage and on athletes’ helmets, uniforms and gear. And it can provide scoring attributions for a brand logo’s prominence in a photo.
Greenfly’s AI tech also can determine the number of athletes in an image. This advantage is crucial for those brands that don’t have player-specific sponsorships and need a minimum number of athletes to appear in an image. Your team can send sponsors the photos eligible for their marketing use.
These capabilities allow Greenfly to quickly match your videos and photos with the right sponsors and curate them into personalized asset galleries. Your team knows when content with logos is shared and posted on social media by players and broadcasters, too.
Plus, you can track this exposure and fan engagement for partners on social and other digital platforms. You can provide more data points to partners to help your team surpass expectations.
Dive Into AI Today
Your corporate partners aren’t waiting around for you to innovate. Now’s the time to tap into AI for sports sponsors. You can create more valuable digital content offerings that move your game day forward. Let us know how we can help.
