SOTI Panel: The Art and Science of Sports Sponsorships

The technology used by athletes to improve performance is regularly visible, either in the gear they’re wearing or the data it provides. But behind the scenes, technology is influencing sports teams and brands in often unseen ways when it comes to sponsorship opportunities.

Pepsi, for example, relied on computer vision from sports sponsorship technology platform Block Six Analytics to learn how to best advertise Lipton on a gigantic LED-screen during Dallas Cowboys games at AT&T Stadium. Pepsi is the bottle-manufacturer of the tea brand, not the producer, and it wanted to highlight a bottle of Lipton tea on the LED screen rather than just a logo. But was that the right call?

“We train our machines on thousands of images so the machine can see in a video where logos are exposed, and it can look for both the image of the logo or the text of the logo,” Block Six Analytics CEO Adam Grossman said Friday during SportTechie’s State Of The Industry virtual conference. “Pepsi wanted to see how many people are seeing this logo both inside and outside of the venue. Instead of having a big bold logo, it really wanted to focus on having a bottle of Lipton.”

https://www.sporttechie.com/sporttechie-state-of-the-industry-soti-2020-sports-sponsorship