It Is Intelligent To Use Artificial Fans, Technology To Maximize Real Fan Engagement
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
On April 12th, the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) became one of the first professional leagues to restart its season since the global spread of the coronavirus. While human fans were not allowed in Taiwan’s Taoyuan Baseball Stadium, the “Rakuten Monkeys unveiled a slate of robot mannequins and cardboard cutouts for their matchup against the CTBC Brothers, and some of the robot fans even banged drums in the stand.”
Why would the Monkeys use robot mannequins and cardboard cutouts in this way? The coronavirus has spurred sports organizations to re-think in-venue, media, and partnership experiences. The one constant in examining and implementing “artificial” fans and technologies as part of these experiences is that they can help maximize engagement of real people.
For example, using "artificial" fans to fill venues to increase real fan engagement is a tactic my co-authors and I highlighted in our book The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry. Italian soccer club Unione Sportiva Triestina Calcio 1918 painted fans on tarps placed around its home venue during the 2010 season for multiple reasons. The team did reduce costs by shutting down portions of its home stadium while opening up new logo exposure opportunities for corporate partners.
The main reason, however, is that using artificial fans “make its games look better on TV” for real people. While many people are predicting that competition cancellations are creating a pent-up demand for live sports content upon their return, it is not clear how long that demand will last.
Therefore, sports organization need to ensure that real fans continued to remain engaged at home if they cannot come to the venues for an extended time after competitions resume. As my co-authors and I discuss in The Sports Strategists, real fans like to see full venues even with “artificial” fans on television or streaming platforms.
Most large teams and leagues, however, do appear to have a different challenge filling their venues than Triestina did in 2010. More specifically, the current issue is that fans are not allowed to come back to venues because of the coronavirus rather than a systemic lack of demand for tickets. Once the coronavirus dissipates then they would not have resort to the measure of having “artificial” fans.
However, many sports organizations already realized that the primary channel for watching games has moved beyond the venue itself well before the coronavirus made live event attendance nearly impossible. As National Basketball Association (NBA) Commissioner Adam stated, “Something I've always said is 99% of people consume our game through some sort of media platform. It's only a tiny percentage of fans who get to see our games in arenas.”
The coronavirus has created a new environment in sports that Eric Brisbell of Sports Business Journal describes as “A new reality powered by AI”. Brisbell highlights how artificial intelligence (AI) was already changing how real fans consume sports content in ways that drive increased engagement. The coronavirus creates a relatively low-risk environment for companies to pursue these changes more aggressively.
For example, Deltatre’s is using AI to change the sports viewing experience in ways that maximize the company’s revenue through real fan engagement. Head of Business and Revenue, Americas Jeff Volk stated, “We know sports fans want to be able to shape a viewing experience that meets their tastes and needs…and we know they’ll pay more for personalization options. In fact, 72% of sports fans view personalization as ‘important’ and 71% of sports fans crave ‘deeper immersion’ when watching live games.”
Why leverage AI to create immersive content that maximizes fan engagement? A more engage fan is a more valuable fan and not just for sports teams and leagues. We have emphasized in post posts that audience engagement is an important consideration for companies exploring sports partnerships. That is because an engaged fan is a more valuable fan for corporate partners.
Research using Block Six Analytics (B6A) Social Sentiment Analysis Platform (SAP) and Corporate Asset Valuation Model (CAV) found a strong and statistically significant correlation between lifts in audience engagement and sentiment with lifts in companies’ revenues across 27 different industries. In addition, sports fans frequently share similar demographic and psychographic profiles of companies’ customers. Given that there could be a large amount of negative economic news involving corporate partners for the foreseeable future, companies should be looking to sports partnerships to generate these lifts.
It seems counterintuitive to say that sports organizations need to look at artificial fans or intelligence as novel approaches to better engage real fans. There is a large amount support, however, that this is exactly what they should be doing and the coronavirus provides the time to further explore these opportunities.