IPL: AI takes the field

It is IPL time.  Time for intense contests between bat and ball, fans and critics, family outings and watching the game with friends, and between TV channels and OTT platforms! Who or what will win, is to be seen.  However, some champions have already emerged!

Being a big banner event, brands wanting to advertise during IPL season have to finalise their budgets and creatives well in advance, and their agencies also have to book media spaces early in expectation of a big ‘return on impact’.  It is needless to emphasise the extent to which media analysis happens during this period and how much data is crunched to give insights to brand and product managers to validate their promotional strategies. It is a critical business decision to advertise in IPL.

While IPL has been innovating on the game and its management – a smart replay system introduced this season – to create more engagement with its fans and viewers, others associated with IPL have also innovated.  This year, the innovation is in the form of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) by OTT and TV broadcasters.

Pre and post-game TV programmes, which are beamed on multiple channels in different languages to attract regional viewers, are now using AI for real-time translation of the analysis.  A viewer can hear an international cricketer of yore giving expert comments in English on one channel, which is broadcast in a regional language in another channel, with the same tonal quality.  AI translation from English to Hindi is being used this year.   With this, it appears as though the foreign cricketer is speaking to the local audience in their lingo.  

This interesting innovation expands the outreach for English-speaking critiques, who can now be heard and understood by a larger section of the fans.  At the same time, one wonders what will happen to those experts of the game who dominated the regional language channels!  It is a competition between an international cricketer-analyst and a domestic-level player – which of the two is likely to give a better analysis of the game, is to be seen!  

Another interesting phenomenon deployed in this IPL is the interplay of OTT, AI and a cricketer, who is also a brand ambassador.  This concept is expected to be a game changer in the context of brand management, product promotions and business communication.  

The OTT platform that is broadcasting IPL matches uses AI’s face recognition feature to identify the player who also happens to be a brand ambassador for a particular brand or product.  Every time the on-field camera focuses on this player (his face or jersey), the relevant product advertisement appears on the viewers’ device – television, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. The advertisement is geo-fenced, implying that, it becomes visible only to those subscribers who fall within a specific geographical location.  For instance, in a match being played in Mohali, when the on-field camera focuses on PBKS’ captain Shikhar Dhawan, the advertisement of the product he endorses appears on the screens of subscribers in Punjab-Haryana areas. The product and the brand ambassador have the highest impact in that region and hence the advertisement generates a significantly higher recall and impact.

Such advertisements appear in real time, without disturbing the transmission of the game. Although viewership of IPL on this OTT is pan-India and overseas, advertisements appear basis the location from where the viewer has connected into the OTT’s channel. So, all viewers are watching the same match but seeing different advertisements on account of the OTT’s AI system. 

Being a contextual advertising strategy, this concept introduces variability of time and frequency of a brand’s appearance during the entire length of play.   Brand managers and media planners need to be aware of this and understand its impact for budgeting. Further, new data points are generated on account of this feature which need to be harnessed for a finer assessment of the campaign’s effectiveness. All these further feed into the brand’s AI system for computing effective RoI, etc.

It may be worthwhile to assume that the next step here would be one-on-one interaction with the subscribers on the OTT platform.  By making advertisements with a call for action button, the target audience gets lured to respond.  If the target audience responds, a new data point gets generated, making brand management a subject of one-to-one marketing.  

In today’s context of skills and jobs, it is often said that curiosity and constant learning to upskill, are essential survival traits in the corporate world.  This IPL reconfirms that.  If brands must reach their target audiences in the most frugal way, the use of AI becomes imperative.  With AI, one needs to think, plan and act differently, which implies that staying on top of such trends will keep product and brand managers more relevant to their profession.  Not only will they need strong analytical skills, but they also need to be creative and strategic thinkers to conceptualise ways to harness the power of AI.  It is a world of voice, video, interactive, immersive, virtual, experiential … and many other such things coming together to make customer engagement more effective and meaningful.

A few years back, a challenging question posed was, ‘Which of my competitors’ product advertisements is my target audience watching?’  This was in the context of, if ‘I am Mercedes Benz, I would like to know the brands that my target audience is following – is it Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Lexus…’

The AI-OTT combination may be the answer.  Who knows what further impact AI can have on us and what further innovation IPL will do to keep alive the interests of its viewers!