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Wimbledon leverages GenAI for personalisation
+ Unilever using AI for product discovery & the IOC announces plans for Esports Olympics
Joe Condon
June 18, 2024
Welcome back to Edition #14 of The SEG3 Report folks.
This week's edition has quite the AI flavour, with Wimbledon & Unilever both utilising GenAI to help deliver personalised experiences, as well as the IOC looking likely to make the Esports Olympics a reality.
As well as it being now just 9 days to go until SEG3 London kicks off 👀
So, here’s what you need to know this week:
Let’s get into it…
IBM & Wimbledon launch GenAI Feature for Personalised Player Stories
IBM and The All England Lawn Tennis Club announce a new feature for the Wimbledon digital experience that will leverage match data with generative AI to keep fans updated on the world's leading players as they advance through The Championships.
Why You Should Care
Personalisation has been a buzz word across many industries for quite some time now. I don’t think it farfetched to say that GenAI will unequivocally shift this from being a ‘how’ to a ‘now’.
Personalisation has been hard for brands for a couple of reasons:
The quality of data you have on your audience
The amount of content you’d need to create to actually make it personalised
Quality of Data
Training a model and educating it on the intricacies of your business and your audience is going to be an incredibly powerful tool.
But this will take time - as we have all been playing around with GenAI for quite a while now, we know the responses/assets it spits out are only as good as the prompts it’s given, and the data that it can query.
As a google exec put it at an event I was at the other week, your data needs to be ‘ready to dance’ before you will fully see the benefits.
From the release, it looks like Wimbledon are personalising the content they distribute based on user preferences and data (such as their location and their myWimbledon profile), starting with their favourite players.
This is a cool first move, but to deliver sophisticated personalised experiences, the data organisations will need to train their models on will need to move beyond just location/name etc, and incorporate all the different touchpoints a consumer has with a brand (whether that be through purchases, engagement on socials, matchday data etc) to build more detailed fan identities.
If AI is good at anything, it’s finding patterns, so providing it with more detailed data on your audience can really help it to predict what the audience wants to see/be delivered, which can then inform your strategy,
Like a content strategy, because as we all know, AI has made content creation as easy as a click of a finger (or a button)...
Producing personalised content
Wimbledon & IBM have opted to train the model on ‘Wimbledon’s editorial style’, which is a fun way of being able to produce content with the mannerisms that you’d expect an AELTC executive would supposedly have, but with a much higher output capability.
The rationale behind this is that they can deliver compelling, insight-driven storytelling at scale, which with all the will in the world from AELTC staff, just would not have been possible without GenAI.
And the tennis audience will be a good test bed for this as in general they seem to be one of the more receptive audiences to technological innovation across the sport. Whether it’s in the form of hawkeye on-court, or off-court with web3 integrations (like Australian Open & ATP Tour have delivered), tennis has been a front-runner in embracing emerging technologies.
So it’s perhaps not a shock that from the research IBM & AELTC conducted that the respondents were positive about how AI could improve their experience, with the top expectations being that 36% thought it would bring about real-time updates, 31% expected more personalised content and 30% expected unique insights.
With the model trained on the preferences of the fans and AELTC content, faster updates, more personalised content & unique insights should be very achievable for IBM & Wimbledon to deliver to the audience.
I’ll be following along to see what the fan sentiment is like this year round and how the training of the model continues to evolve, so I doubt it’ll be the last time we cover this in the report!
Early Bird passes for SEG3 London end in under 48 hours!
Use the code London20 for 20% off your pass to join the likes of:
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Unilever Power Product Discovery with GenAI
Unilever beauty brands are using artificial intelligence to create engaging, hyper-personalised consumer experiences – helping to drive growth through market development, premium positioning and increased sales.
Why You Should Care
It’s really cool to see sports organisations like the AELTC trialling with GenAI, but undoubtedly the industry that has been most impacted by GenAI is advertising & marketing.
From training models based on your ideal customer to replace focus groups, to utilising tools to design creative assets and copy, the entire workflow for agencies and brands has changed.
Unilever are smart cookies, and have been playing with different tools to help personalise the experiences and use GenAI to signpost products best suited to their customers; these being:
BeautyHub PRO: An AI selfie tool for personalised skincare and haircare advice.
Dove’s Scalp + Hair Therapist: An AI diagnostic tool providing scalp and hair care recommendations.
POND’S SKIN INSTITUTE AI Skin Expert: A skin analysis tool offering tailored skincare solutions.
This personalisation and recommendation isn’t just nice to have - it’s driving significant business outcomes too.
For anyone that uses the BeautyHub PRO tool, their checkout value is 39% higher than consumers who shop elsewhere and those who discover new recommendations are 43% more likely to complete a purchase.
The insights gained from these tools are then helping to guide the content that Unilever is producing for their community, ensuring their campaigns remain relevant and meet the needs of their customers.
And it’s working - from the same research, it’s shown that marketing assets where this data has been applied show a 23% increase in ad recall, and 7% higher purchasing intent.
Hyper-personalisation at scale is going to become the new norm, and it looks like it’s going to have a significant impact on how brands communicate, build desirability for their products & drive growth.
The Olympic Esports Games looks to be on the cards
With Paris just around the corner, it is another games that is on the IOC’s agenda; the Olympic Esports Games.
The Executive Board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced it will officially suggest and discuss the creation of the Olympic Esports Games during the next IOC Session, which is set to take place during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Why you should care?
President of the IOC, Thomas Bach said: “With the creation of Olympic Esports Games, the IOC is taking a major step forward and is keeping up with the pace of the digital revolution. We are very excited how enthusiastically the esports community represented in our Esports Commission has engaged with this initiative. This is further proof of the attractivity of the Olympic brand and the values it stands for.”
The Olympics is the world’s biggest sporting event, and the integration of esports into it has been a narrative that has been going on for many years.
Does esports need the Olympics, or does the Olympics need esports?
In my opinion it’s a win-win for both.
For esports, the Olympics adds visibility & interest to the top talent in the industry, which should trickle down to the year-round calendar, and adds a layer of national competition at the highest level.
For the Olympics, it brings an audience that they have been avidly trying to reach for a number of years.
There are however a few interesting points worth picking out from the release:
It sounds like this will be a completely separate entity, not wedded to following the IOC’s traditional organisational & financial models.
This is probably due to a couple of factors:
Financial Models
The need for publishers to be involved in the conversation (and what seat at the table they’ll want)
The esports audience being less open to traditional commercialisation methods (and how there’s a need to build a more nuanced commercial model to fit that audience)
Organisational Model
Esports being slightly fragmented as it stands with multiple international federations (i.e. Global Esports Federation & International Esports Federation)
I think it’s a smart move to allow it to find its own way, and not dictate how it should be structured based on a traditional sports model.
The titles that’ll be played at the Esports Games
The biggest sticking point in building a product that attracts audiences is likely going to be the game choice for the event.
The IOC is against games that have violent themes (in a bid to protect the Olympic brand and messaging), but the games that attract the largest audiences to the usual esports circuit tend to be games with some level of violence (i.e. League of Legends, Counter-Strike etc).
In all likelihood, the IOC will opt for sim games of its federations sports to try and get buy-in, or games that have a fit to one of it’s federations IP - i.e. NBA 2K or Rocket League (with its relative association to football)
Overall, It’s a fairly seismic move from the IOC to future-proof the games, and adds a new dimension and set of eyeballs to the Olympic brand, which can never be a bad thing.
And if they do choose to loosen the rules on light violence and add in Clash Royale as one of the mobile titles, British Esports, I’m available for selection!
In other news…
A quick round-up of other stories we found interesting this week!
Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!