AI in Sponsorships: A Powerful Ally or Just a Data Cruncher?
AI is fundamentally changing advertising, sports, sponsorships, media, and every industry. We can now use algorithms to understand what people are looking at and what they are interested in. AI helps advertisers make smart sponsorship decisions, track sponsorship value, optimize visibility, and refine strategies like never before.
But is AI enough for successful partnerships? Can it replace a human managing sponsorships? Or on the contrary, AI-powered insights must be blended with a human’s expertise? If AI provides the data, humans are building strategy, relationships and using creativity to stand out. In this article we will think about where AI excels and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. Let’s start!
Humans VS Machines
Have you ever questioned: who's better, who's stronger, who's more important - man or machine? The correct answer is that the joint work of man and machine makes the strongest impact. Humans do have a heartbeat, machines don't. Humans do have fears and doubts, they are emotional. Machines - don’t have any of that. Humans can change their lives instantly by action, changing their strategies following the situation. Machines are programmed, and because of that, they have to follow their programs with no deviation.
Only AI and human collaboration, where machines assist humans, makes a huge difference. Only then we can squeeze out the best results from any deal, sponsorship, or collaboration. There are many companies specializing in computer vision, which effectively means that humans teach computers how to see, in much the same way humans do thanks to artificial intelligence. They look at all the editorial content published every day, look at social content, look at broadcast television, and develop an understanding of what's happening in all those different mediums across imagery, across video, and commercialize that in a variety of ways.
Companies apply AI computer vision to broadcast television and also to social media and places like YouTube to identify everywhere where a sponsorship appears and calculate the value of those sponsorships. The idea is that they look at every single frame that's published around a given sport, every single moment. AI-driven tools identify a sponsorship, and when they do that, they see how long it's in view, but in addition to that, they see things like what's the size of that actual mention.
AI tools differentiate when the branded image is blurry, or it is clear, or even obfuscated in any way. Humans question if it is the only sponsorship in view at any given moment, does it have a 100% Share of Voice (SOV). And for that, created a common formula for measuring Share of Voice:
(Brand Mentions or Spend ÷ Total Industry Mentions or Spend) × 100 = SOV
It for sure seems complicated to handle Share of Voice (SOV) metrics manually, but AI Marketing Platforms like Entyx execute SOV calculation automatically. AI marketing tools by Entyx allow us to look at every single frame of every single mention and calculate the exposure programmatically, so it's a much more comprehensive approach to solving that valuation issue. Look how it measures logos in frame: Entyx x OG.
The Entyx platform features AI-powered analytics that significantly ease and speed up the SOV measuring process. Our tools increase SOV by making your ads more efficient and remarkable. Among them are:
Video & Audio AI Analysis: This feature automatically analyzes video and audio content, recognizing logos, tracking keywords, and assessing audience sentiment. These insights allow you to fine-tune your advertising campaigns, ensuring maximum audience engagement.
Smart Banners: Place and manage automated advertising banners across various streaming channels on Twitch. Analyze banner display performance in real-time, optimize placement, and increase brand visibility. This system allows for precise targeting and maximizes the impact of your banner ads.
Gamification: Our interactive ad formats, like Catch the Drop, increase engagement levels and boost media share.
AI In The Sports Industry
When it comes to the sports industry, there is hardly an area where AI does not hold enormous potential. By examining selected use cases, researchers at Weihau Auto Beizheim School of Management have demonstrated how developments in AI affect the sports industry and have highlighted the promises they hold for the future of sports. AI is one of the most controversial technologies seen in recent years, but it is also one of the most exciting and one that has already made an impact on our everyday lives.
In the early 2000s, for instance, the Oakland Athletics were lacking financial resources. This Major League Baseball (MLB) team decided to take a radical, analytics-driven approach to squad planning that helped them identify undervalued players. With this new approach, the team made the playoffs four years in a row. The story even caught the attention of Hollywood, where Brad Pitt was cast in the lead role of the 2011 screen adaptation Moneyball.
Smart robots and computers already control our cars, assist surgeons, build new houses, and check tax returns. In other words, the AI boom has already begun, but there is still a long way to go. AI has also been on everyone's radar in the world of sports.
So far, AI implementation in the world of sports often involves advanced analytics, rather than AI in the narrow sense. Therefore comes a question, what are the things AI can do and what it can't?
Some Things AI Can Help You With
It's really important to remember that sponsorship is a people business. At its core, it is B2B sales. Sponsorship as a discipline is about marketing, which again is about connecting brands to people they're interested in selling products to or bringing in as customers.
One of the things that you can use AI for is to help you write emails. No need to use AI to help write 5,000-word spam emails selling your gold, silver, or bronze proposals. What AI can do is help you generate emails based on the prospect you're reaching out to and the data you've collected. It can help you test subject lines. It can help you test short emails. It can help you test longer form emails if that's appropriate, all with the expressed goal of booking a discovery call, not selling stuff by email. If you think that AI has made it easy for you to write 2,000-word spam emails to people, remember it's done the same for all of your competitors. So if you want to stand out, you'll treat people with respect and you'll write emails as though a human wrote it rather than a spam bot.
Something that sponsorship seekers often really struggle with is coming up with creative activation ideas for their audience. What a great way to use AI. AI can help you come up with new creative activation ideas and activities for your audience. You can input who your audience is, talk about the type of event or opportunity you have, and ask AI to help you come up with a list of 10, 20, and 1000 cool activation ideas that would be engaging for your particular audience. Rather than constantly trying to come up with new ideas, engage AI to help you find some new and exciting ways to engage your audience. Segmenting your audience to understand who your niches are, your buyer personas, or your avatars is a manual process. So why not engage AI to help you filter through your audience data and come up with who your key personas are? Use AI to help you segment your audience find your audience personas and expand upon them so that you can understand them better.
And of course, AI can help you build out proposals, structure your proposals, and build out reports like fulfillment reports. Think of AI more as a lever that makes heavy things lighter than as the individual is just gonna come and take this off your hands completely. It's a tool, not a replacement.
Some Things AI Definitely Can't Do
Let’s see why it's so critically important to have a human involved in your sponsorship sales.
AI cannot conduct a discovery session. Can it be a chatbot on your website? Sure, but that's not the same as sitting down with the head of marketing and understanding what they're trying to achieve, and who they're after and then brainstorming with them some new and interesting activation ideas. You've already got the audience data. You've already got your proposal built. You've already got your list of 10,000 activation ideas. Now it's up to you to sit down with someone, have that chemistry brainstorm, and come up with some ways to engage their target market with some of those cool activation ideas.
Collecting audience data, actually sitting down and speaking to your audience, running focus groups, and knowing what questions to ask based on your conversation with sponsors. This is not something AI can do. It's something AI can help with, but you know your audience best. You're the expert on who your audience is. So you have to know the best way and only you really can know the best way to collect that data and what would be relevant to your audience and what would be relevant to your sponsor.
However, AI can help you come up with some good survey questions to ask your audience. AI might be able to help you craft emails with a higher open rate to get people to fill out your surveys. But collecting audience data, that's gonna be up to you, the property owner.
And obviously, AI is not gonna be able to negotiate or renegotiate sponsorship deals. It's not gonna be able to upgrade current sponsors into multi-year sponsorship deals. It's not gonna be able to sit across from a sponsor and hand them a fulfillment report and ask them how they think everything went.
Final Thought
AI's advancement will not leave sports unaffected. Those who act now will be ahead of the curve in the long run. Innovations rarely succeed in a solo effort. Managers and sports organizations should work closely with AI tools and AI-driven marketing platforms like Entyx to fully put all the potential to good use. Ultimately, managers active in the sports industry must find the right balance between art and science. It is the unexpected that makes sports so fascinating. And that's why AI should be seen as an opportunity to meaningfully supplement, rather than replace, the current ways business decisions are made. Try how well you collaborate with AI, we are waiting for you here!