Visual Sponsorship Monitoring Value for World-Leading Platforms

The Sports Sponsorship industry is poised for accelerated growth with over $500 billion dollars of estimated investment in 2022; a more than 41% compound annual growth. Approximately 80% of this spend will be on TV and digital streaming rights, which in turn will draw brands across the world.

Yet companies don’t invest blindly. They want to see if their investment has delivered solid ROI. Unlike other marketing channels that provide detailed reporting of multiple datapoints, sports sponsorship ROI measurement has evolved slowly over the decades and remains challenging, with research highlighting between 68% to 88% of all sponsorships are inefficient.

Understanding ROI requires multiple data points from numerous channels, but it all begins with understanding how much exposure a brand has received for its investment in an event or tournament. This exposure analysis begins with understanding impressions.

Computer Vision performs the role of analyzing visual content to detect and log the frequency, type and quality of the impressions gained. Without Computer Vision, this analysis would have to be done by humans, which would be too slow and costly to be viable, or it would have to be based on sample data. This would involve making assumptions and inferences, which would dramatically reduce the accuracy and reliability of the data.

Impressions do not all have equal value, but there is still some value in most cases.  There are key factors that can help determine the value of each impression.

In this example we see a range of brands, but various factors will impact on the value of the impressions. Time on screen, visibility, size, prominence, clarity and share of voice, are all factors that can be used to produce individual weightings for each impression. And every factor is automatically annotated for each brand detection by VISUA.

For sure! We developed our SORT (Sponsorship Opportunities Research Tracking) feature specifically for that. In practice, this is the opposite of brand detection in that SORT looks for potential placements without branding that gained significant exposure. By combining object and placement detection, sponsorship agencies and asset owners can identify new brand placement opportunities for sponsors and even provide potential exposure ROI data from historical footage and media, allowing precise valuation for possible sponsors and their expected return on said sponsorship.

So if you are looking for sponsors in a new area that has not received sponsorship before or you want to ensure that your current brand exposures at venues are as efficient as possible, VISUA’s SORT technology can help.

Sports sponsorship monitoring and brand monitoring generally has been a core service for us from when we first opened our doors back in 2016. Since then we have continued to develop our technology and today we are proven to deliver the most accurate rate with the highest levels of detection in the industry.

The key reason for this is thanks to two features we developed specifically for analyzing sports and fast moving content:

1) Full frame-rate processing
Where data accuracy is critical to clients it is important that the footage is analyzed frame by frame rather than only X number of frames per second. VISUA’s Computer VIsion is able to analyze every frame as required by the project.

2) ‘Perfect Data’.
In some cases impressions may be fleeting or because of fast panning, they may also be blurred. Despite this a human viewer will still register this impression, so although lower value, it still has some value in the overall data set. VISUA’s Computer Vision allows these fleeting and highly blurred logos to be specifically trained for detection. By annotating a single example all future impressions will be detected. This ensures you achieve the highest detection rates in the industry for data you can rely on.

No. We are not experts in sports sponsorship valuation, but rather on Computer Vision itself and how it can be best applied to extract valuable data that can help derive valuation and ROI insights. As such our technology simply provides the raw data that can be imported into sponsorship valuation platforms and combined with their other data sources for those companies and their customers to form conclusions based on their own valuation algorithms

Any popular image and video formats can be processed and checked, including live broadcast and streaming video formats.

Absolutely. One of the key advantages of VISUA’s Visual-AI technology is our extremely low latency real-time processing, which is ideal in live broadcast and streaming applications or where you require content to be checked in real-time.

There are many reasons why some computer vision providers are better than others. It would be outside the scope of this answer to list them all, but the key reasons are as follows:

1) Most offerings are not purpose built for the task of sport sponsorship valuation. VISUA’s API is.

2) One important factor in monitoring sports/sponsorship content is the ability to quickly and easily add new logos and marks to the brand library. Not all computer vision APIs allow this and even the ones that do require lengthy training. VISUA’s API is the only one with our patented Adaptive Learning Engine, which eliminates the need for training data. This allows you to activate new client brands quickly and provide them valuable insights in hours rather than weeks.

3) In some cases you may want/need a computer vision solution that can be deployed on-premise. VISUA’s offering is the only one that supports this.

4) Batched task processing is essential for efficient API calls. It allows you to fire multiple tasks from a single API call rather than having to make multiple calls on the same piece of media. Only VISUA and Microsoft’s APIs provide Batched Task Processing.

We have also developed specific comparison documents, which are available in our Resources section. However, if you would like to discuss this further please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

When it comes to sports sponsorship monitoring, the choice of computer vision provider is absolutely critical. So the key factors and features that you need to look out for are:

The most important is accuracy. Your provider must be able to deliver the most accurate data AND show you how the detections were derived, with minimal input by humans. This means as high a frame rate for processing as possible, to limit assumptions and inferences. VISUA’s PerfectData technology has been proven, time and again, to deliver the highest accuracy across the industry, with processing as high as full framerate where desired.

Next comes scale. Most computer vision providers can deliver good results at low volume, but data accuracy and reliability can fall quickly when volumes rise. So be sure that your provider can handle real-world high-scale processing. VISUA’s offering has been road-tested across many high-scale applications, so you get the same quality and reliability whatever your volume needs.

Brand Activation Time is another factor. You may need to activate new brands at times, so it’s important that you can do so instantly, without the need to train new models over days and weeks. Also, be sure that your provider does not have a restricted library of brands and that you can add what you need whenever you need to. VISUA has a completely customisable brand library, that already contains over 100 thousand brands and marks. Most importantly, adding new brands is as simple as uploading a single logo file thanks to our Instant Logo Learning technology.

Will it be important to understand not only the impressions but also their specific placements in a stadium, track or clothing, etc? If so, be sure that, like VISUA, your provider can support placements and can deliver placement data.

In some cases data processing time will be key. Whether it’s days or seconds, be sure your provider can process at the speed you need. VISUA can deliver real-time processing, providing near instant insights on live broadcasts or streams.

Your final key choice is whether a cloud provider will suffice or you need on-premise processing. Which is best to choose is very often project specific, but whether you need on-premise now, or think you might do in future, be sure your provider, like VISUA, can deploy a fully, or hybrid, on-premise implementation with full support.

Yes, you may well be able to build this yourself. But the key question is what are the pros and cons of doing so? You could build a CRM system for your business, but in virtually every case you’ll instead go use Hubspot, Salesforce or similar. Building your own CRM, although technically possible, provides no major advantage to your business.

Similarly, building your own computer vision solution, specifically for sports sponsorship monitoring, also doesn’t make sense in most cases for the following reasons:

1) The problem exists today – you don’t have time to develop this tech, while competitors are already providing these valuable visual insights.

2) Visual-AI (computer vision) is a very specific discipline of machine learning and requires expertise that you likely don’t have.

3) Building a low scale solution is achievable – building a solution that can deal with the massive scale usually required in production environments is a much more complex proposition.

4) Building a Visual-AI solution that allows you to easily add new logos and marks in minutes and doesn’t require massive volumes of model training data every time is not something you’ll have access to with off-the-shelf API solutions.

5) Currently available computer vision APIs do not provide on-premise capabilities – vital for many very high volume implementations.

Great question. This is another quite unique offering from VISUA. Deployment can be implemented in the cloud, on-premise or even a combination of cloud and on-premise if required.

We like to think that our Visual-AI (computer vision) API is very easy to implement as part of any workflow, in fact, in most cases implementation takes as little as two hours. We have very clear API documentation also. But we are not simply an API provider, so do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions you may have. We also implement a very thorough onboarding process and as a client you will have direct access to our team for any ongoing support questions.

Yes, you can find very clear API documentation for our Logo Detection endpoint, or indeed any of our other technologies. You can find all relevant documentation here.

Absolutely! Unlike other solutions on the market that charge significant fees for support, or force you to reach out to third-party consultants, VISUA is proud to be much more than simply an API provider. You can get in touch with any questions you may have during your research and feasibility stage. We also implement a very thorough onboarding process and as a client you will have direct access to our team for any ongoing support questions.

VISUA is not an API company, like other providers. As such we don’t provide ‘support packages’. Support and guidance, both pre and post implementation is part of our DNA. In other words, if you need help with our tech or have questions, we’re here to provide the answers.

Yes, of course. We can give you a demo of how our sports sponsorship monitoring API works. Just fill in the form at the bottom of this page or get in touch with us at [email protected] and we can arrange a time.