With the right data that provides a view into who people are in both their personal and professional lives, sports brands can garner insights, sharpen targeting, refine strategies, and most importantly, improve the fan experience.

Fan-alytics: A data-driven approach to truly understanding fans

Data that provides a thorough understanding of a fanbase’s demographic makeup is vital to drive fan engagement through the TV medium. Gen-Z, for instance, is more likely to consume TV content on mobile devices and align with brands that share their beliefs. Millennials are likely to watch local news and exhibit a more casual TV viewing approach. Understanding such nuances can guide the tailoring of sports content to cater to these demographic preferences.

However, traditional demographics are just one part of the equation. Insights into fan interests, preferences and behaviors are instrumental in crafting personalised engagement strategies as well. Fans’ TV viewership habits offer valuable cues for increased TV engagement. For instance, fans of live sports, particularly those who watch multiple major sports regularly, are also likely to engage with Sci-Fi programming. Advertisers can use this type of understanding to target these fans effectively with the right content on the right channels at the right time.

By understanding fan motivations and decision-drivers, sports organisations can align their TV marketing efforts even more effectively. For instance, knowing that golf fans are more likely to be environmentally conscious and purchase green products can inform the choice of sponsors and partners. Such an audience would likely resonate with advertisers promoting eco-friendly initiatives, resulting in a win-win situation.

It’s also worth considering the influence of digital behaviours on fan engagement. Basketball fans, for example, are more likely to subscribe to on-demand streaming services and make mobile investments, and soccer fans are more likely to adopt new technologies early. Understanding these trends can help sports brands tap into the digital tendencies of their fans, perhaps through app-based interactions or personalised digital ads related to TV broadcasts.

Insights into the professional lives of fans can support the development of customised offerings with B2B fans. Sports brands could communicate group business outing offers through TV broadcasting.

Scoring big on fan engagement through television

The key for sports brands looking to drive TV engagement amongst their fans is to understand their audience deeply and find innovative ways to resonate with unique preferences and behaviours. Here are just a few ways sports brands could tailor their TV presence to increase fan engagement.

Targeted advertising: Leveraging predictive data, sports brands can deploy targeted advertising tactics to make the most of TV viewership and drive engagement. This can involve airing commercials around specific times when certain audiences are most likely to be watching. By strategically aligning ad content with the interests, preferences, behaviors, and even the demographic makeup of different fan segments, sports brands can significantly boost engagement levels and enhance the overall fan experience.

Brand alliances with specific products: Given that some fans may be environmentally conscious ‘green’ shoppers while others may be value-seekers looking for a deal, sports brands could partner with companies that offer products that align to those preferences for commercials during specific games or events.

Multilingual broadcasts: To cater to diverse linguistic demographics, sports brands could offer broadcasts in multiple languages. Not only does this improve accessibility, but it also helps fans feel seen and valued.

Technology early adopters engagement: Considering some fans are more likely to be early adopters of new technologies, sports brands could explore collaborations with tech companies for innovative TV experiences, such as virtual reality or augmented reality broadcasts.

The final whistle

Predictive audience data and a keen understanding of fan behaviours can empower sports brands to personalise their outreach. By gaining a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their fanbase, brands can unlock endless opportunities to improve engagement on the screen and beyond.

Outlining the forces he thinks will shape television in 2022, he listed co-innovation, data and analytics, greater use of the cloud, and super-aggregation as stand-out items.

Targeted advertising is a great example of why we need more co-innovation, he suggests, pointing to the value of end-to-end technology solutions, but also the need to work within local regulatory and business relationship contexts that platform operators and broadcasters/streaming services are sensitive too. “It requires a huge transformation [for media companies] to introduce advanced advertising and there is lots of work with customers to clarify the business detail and their objectives, as well as preparing for the technical integrations,” Leonetti confirms.

Viaccess-Orca (VO) supports server-side and client-side ad insertion for broadcast and streamed television, across linear and on-demand, to support targeted advertising, and this solution can be pre-integrated with programmatic infrastructure, including from Smart AdServer. The advanced advertising offer draws heavily upon the data analytics expertise at VO and along with co-innovation, it is data and actionable analytics that will help to differentiate solution vendors in the years ahead, Leonetti reckons.

Advanced advertising, next-generation user experiences and the evolution towards super-aggregation are all built upon strong data capabilities, and Viaccess-Orca has been outlining how data impacts each one. With advertising for example, one of the keys to success is the privacy-compliant use of first-party media owner data, including viewing data, to create specific audience segments that an advertiser can address.

Some of the data being fed into the decisions about which ad is served to which households include household composition, personal interests and life moments. All three of these inputs can be partly or largely derived from viewing data. Artificial Intelligence algorithms help to extract these insights and contribute towards an understanding of purchase potential. AI is also being used to fit the advertising experience – including the ad display models used – to viewer preferences, including taking account of sensitivity to advertising.

When it comes to the UX, Leonetti points to the way that marketing teams have been unleashed thanks to a better understanding of what is happening on platforms and how individual consumers use a service. QoE is a crucial starting point, so you know viewers have an uninterrupted and high-quality video experience.

“Now set-top boxes are using home Wi-Fi you have to know the quality of the Wi-Fi, which has a huge impact on QoE,” VO’s CEO offers as one example. Outlining another, he adds: “You may discover that what turns out to be a must-use feature is hidden too far down the menus, and you can improve the customer journey.”

One Viaccess-Orca Pay TV customer increased the revenue on their TV service by an astonishing 12% thanks to a better understanding of subscriber behaviour and better content discovery, all of which stemmed from harnessing existing data.

There is an important correlation between UX and advertising: personalisation and higher engagement means more hours spent watching video and so more targeted ad insertion opportunities. Studies have also shown that consumers welcome relevant ads, so targeting is thought to add to the overall uplift in the user experience.

Item No.3 on Leonetti’s list is the cloud, which is where more of VO’s data and analytics solutions are now being hosted. “We have many RFPs still asking for on-prem deployment so we must support this capability, but we see high demand now for cloud migration. We are leveraging the cloud for our next-generation of analytics solutions. This is not about cost savings for customers – economics is the wrong reason for doing it; it is about the ability to adapt quickly so you can create new features and solutions every month.”

Viaccess-Orca is helping customers create privacy-compliant data lakes that different departments can tap into for their different applications – with marketing and UX product managers being among the beneficiaries. “Something [data] that was previously used by just a few people is now open to everyone,” Leonetti declares.

Super-aggregation is the fourth trend VO is helping platform operators to tackle and this also requires core data management skills that have already been used to populate and update EPGs and drive recommendation engines. The difference, Leonetti says, is that the use of data to link and surface content is now being expanded beyond broadcast and local on-demand services to onboarded streaming services.

“There are more services, there is more data. Content is duplicated. You have to identify the same content that is appearing in different services,” he observes.

And how far do the onboarded apps share viewing data to help with content discovery? “On the set-top box that depends on what our customers can negotiate with the SVOD services. Some are very open to full integration into the operator ecosystem, although it is different from one content owner to another.”

Leonetti adds: “The integration of SVOD services is becoming a must.  All Pay TV providers are trying to position themselves as a super-aggregator; this is a priority and a major trend.”

Do these priorities resonate with you?

Super-aggregation, content discovery, advanced advertising and operations transformation are all on the agenda at Connected TV World Summit 2022, which addresses ‘The Great Recalibration’ of TV. Discussions include how media owner first-party data can be fully harnessed to create incremental value to advertisers and new revenues for TV. You can find more information here.

The term connectivity+ neatly sums up these near-term opportunities for CSPs to add value via broadband-dependent services and apps that go beyond connectivity. In parallel, they can become more involved in the smart home, a whole category of add-ons ranging from smart door locks, doorbells and refrigerators to active security systems and health monitoring/remote health.

In all cases, CSPs are just one of the places consumers will be able to get these services (whether from them directly or via partners). There will be plenty of ‘OTT’ competition. And as with everything, understanding consumers, thanks to privacy-compliant personal data and the analysis of it, could decide who best anticipates needs and delivers the most compelling offers, fastest.

Daniel Hesselbarth, Principal, Business Consulting at EPAM, a leading global development, digital platform engineering and product design agency, believes that while CSPs have existing customer relationships that may, in theory, give them an advantage over competitors in the race to provide connectivity+ and smart home services, this relationship is fairly one-dimensional and data-light today – far from sufficient for the world we are entering.

“The CSP may know the customer from a commercial standpoint – as a revenue generating unit – but not their behaviours and experiences as a person, family or group of people in a home,” argues Hesselbarth. “Huge amounts of data are not being analysed by the CSP, such as fluctuations in terms of bandwidth per device or whether the customer is particularly security conscious.”

“The router knows everything,” he affirms. “You know the type of device, whether it’s mobile or fixed-line, the quality of service, usage behaviour, problems with lag and interference. The CSP would be able to determine all of that through the router. The CSP needs to collect and analyse the data properly to leverage its window of advantage and build up new services.”

Assuming GDPR compliance is properly executed and legally watertight and that the trust of the customer is maintained, the CSP is advised to ramp-up the collection of home usage data through the router and/or mobile devices via its own apps.

Hesselbarth believes it is the data- driven CSP that will enjoy the most success in the emerging connectivity+ and smart home markets. “Telecoms will have to adopt new business models based around data,” he says. “The data they will have access to is enormous as more devices become connected. Telecoms are in a very good position to leverage this data and offer customers personalised digital services.”

He stresses: “The single most pressing activity the CSP needs to do is build up their competency in data gathering. They need to collect GDPR-compliant data and apply intelligence in order to deliver personalised information and recommendations to the customer and to cycle back into services and product updates. This further requires a change in the organisation’s culture by building up in-house competency and hiring data scientists.”

CSPs can draw from experiences in television, where data science is already a top priority. And of course, many CSPs with the broadband focus to explore connectivity+ and smart home are also television providers. Television services provide examples of the organisational and data ‘re-engineering’ that is relevant to other activities. One can be found at Liberty Global, the pan-European cable operator/CSP.

Liberty Global now features a cloud-native microservices architecture built on AWS that provides one ‘back office’ for set-top box and OTT video services for cross-device customer journeys and a data lake that uses AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) to better inform decisions around product design, customer satisfaction and potential new revenue sources.

“One result is an environment ripe for self-disruption, continuous innovation and optimisation by instituting rapid design, build, test and deploy programmes,” explains Aliaksandr Baradyntsau, European Head of Media & Telco at EPAM. “This digital transformation journey helped Liberty Global enable agile processes, regular production releases and speed up time-to-market.

“The data lake leverages insights from individual viewing behaviours and greater audience trends to make each interaction more personal with anonymised data,” Baradyntsau continues. “With this foundation in place, customers have continuous access to new enhancements like tailored recommendations and individual watchlists.”

Broadband and beyond: the next steps for service providers

This is an edited excerpt from the new Videonet report, ‘Broadband and beyond’, which argues that even ultra-fast broadband will become commoditised, so communications service providers (CSPs) need to think about how they differentiate themselves and where they make money in future. They need to look towards connectivity+ services like premium managed Wi-Fi and family management, and place themselves at the centre of the smart home, whether offering customer care bots or security cameras.

The report explores the opportunities ahead and the operator transformation needed to capitalise on them, including a focus on cybersecurity, a data-driven culture, and agile device and service development. The report concludes that fixed-line providers are well-placed for this journey, from smart customer home all the way to the smart city, and reveals why.

You can download the (free) report here.