Press Release: A New Era In Sports Sponsorship Valuation

Visual-AI Company VISUA Ushers In New Era In Sports Sponsorship Valuation with Disruptive Commercial Models

VISUA aims to change the face of Sports Sponsorship Valuation at scale with new approach to broadcast data analysis

Leading Visual-AI company, VISUA is looking to drive the next generation in sports sponsorship valuation analysis at scale with new commercial partnerships made possible by key innovations in its Visual-AI (Computer Vision) technology stack.

The Sports Sponsorship industry is poised for accelerated growth as we exit the COVID pandemic phase, with a projected $501.43 billion in 2022 (representing 41.3% CAGR). The majority of this spend, (~80% of it), will be spent on TV and digital streaming rights. 

But the industry has faced an ongoing problem. The first is reporting the value and ROI back to sponsors with the same forensic level of accuracy and detail that other channels, such as digital advertising, can provide. Research highlights that most sponsorships are inefficient from an ROI perspective and range from between 68% to 88% of all sponsorships being inefficient. Over the years little has changed in how sponsorships are valued and many sponsors continue to struggle to accurately measure ROI. Essentially because of a lack of accurate data. The second issue is one of cost. Accumulating all the required insights from this vast source of unstructured data has a high initial cost. So relevant parties have settled for analyzing individual matches rather than the entire league for the entire season.

For the first time VISUA aims to help solve both problems thanks to innovations in its technology offering that simultaneously allow new and innovative commercial models to be agreed, allowing broadcast sports content to be analyzed at scale in a partnership model.

Traditional approaches to sponsorship value analysis for broadcast and streaming channels have involved two approaches. Sampling of content has allowed a fast turnaround of valuation reports at low cost, but relies on inference and assumptions, and so is not ideal. The alternative approach is to use humans to manually analyze the footage and mark up impressions, which is expensive and time-consuming.VISUA, co-founder and CTO, Alessandro Prest explains:

“Sponsors want accurate data about their broadcast and team sponsorships, just like they get from their other marketing and promotion channels. So giving them partial insights from a subset of matches simply isn’t going to cut it anymore when millions of dollars are on the line. It’s fair to say that monitoring brand impressions is not the only datapoint in a complete monitoring toolset, but it’s a key datapoint, so it needs to be accurate. That’s why VISUA has worked to deliver our latest generation of Visual-AI that allows full frame rate analysis of video content at scale, that matches human analysis but exponentially faster and at much lower cost.”

Because of the efficiency of the Visual-AI technology, VISUA is looking to engage with partners in an entirely different way to other companies in this space. 

Luca Boschin, VISUA, co-founder and CEO, adds: “The traditional client/provider relationship stifles the ability to deliver complete and comprehensive insights to sponsors in this space. Rather than being asked to analyze a small number of games for one team, we want to work collaboratively with interested partners to process every match, in every league, of every sport, in every country. Together we can establish a resource of data that can benefit any and all sponsors in one fell swoop.” 

Estimates further show that sponsorship of Womens’ Sports grew by 146% and ESports by 26% YoY. The costs involved in delivering complete and accurate insights in these and other emerging areas have been prohibitive to date, but are now possible with this new approach.

Luca closes: “We are looking for sports sponsorship agencies and monitoring companies to partner with us to drive this new era in data analysis for valuation insights. The old approach is no longer fit for purpose in this digital and AI age, it’s time that stakeholders collaborate in new ways to deliver the kind of insights that sponsors crave.”

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