Inside Deloitte's Plan to Personalize Sports Broadcasts

Why do sports need a truckload of media coverage when a simple roomful will do? During the 2022 NBA All-Star weekend in Cleveland last month, the league reached fans in 215 countries and territories in 60 languages. That happened largely thanks to the NBA’s World Feed Truck, a 40-foot vehicle parked outside of Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse and filled with monitors, equipment and technicians working to localize coverage of basketball’s midseason showcase. International pregame, halftime, postgame and off-court shows are distributed out of the truck, as are international commentary, play-by-play, and the signature calls and slogans of local personalities. Matt Brabants, the NBA’s svp and head of international content partnerships, considers it vital to the league as coverage expands around the globe. “As we’ve expanded the distribution of NBA games and programming to more countries and territories, the World Feed Truck helps ensure our broadcast partners around the world are able to deliver high quality, in-language programming and locally relevant graphics to our passionate international fans on the devices and platforms they use most,” he said. If Deloitte has its way, however, the World Feed Truck and others like it will be towed away for scrap in the near future. Earlier this week, the accounting and professional services firm acquired media technology consulting and design company National TeleConsultants (NTC) as part of its continued push into software products. With NTC’s powers, Deloitte aims to do more than just personalize sports marketing. The larger goal is to change the mechanics of sports broadcasts in general by moving trucks and other technical infrastructure into the cloud. “[The shift to the cloud] is already enabling changes in how people consume content and advertising,” said John Footen, a former NTC vice president who now serves as Deloitte’s managing director of media and entertainment, “and will further enable what I would argue are brand new genres and new ways of consuming and interacting with media as we go forward.” Turner Sports and US Soccer Deal Brings National Team Games to HBO Max in 2023 The future will be narrowcast Data and AI are already providing sports marketers a deeper look into fans’ viewing habits and behaviors. What they’re doing to a far more limited extent is changing how those fans view the game. Footen sees a future in which marketing, game footage and special features are “in one bucket” in the cloud while being processed by “the hugest supercomputers in the world.” The ideal result is a personalized version of the game that viewers find more compelling, pay more attention to and, ultimately, makes them more amenable to sponsors’ marketing. Currently, production trucks are the only means of altering the original feed of the game with graphics, commentary and other additions. Multiple microphones, cameras and digital features are distilled down to one version of a game that may be distinguished only by language or selected audio tracks (think Monday Night Football’s ManningCast). But if all of those cameras and microphones go straight to the cloud via 5G connections, a broadcast could be personalized to focus on a viewer’s favorite player or hear commentary from other players on a bench or in a dugout. “It is important that we recognize that sports along with everything else is a storytelling experience,” Footen said. “The story still needs to be told, but that doesn't mean that the story is interfered with in any way—in fact, I would argue it would be more compelling.” Disney Extends Major League Baseball TV Rights to ESPN+ as Streaming Momentum Slows Through a new lens Major sports leagues have only dabbled in such personalized viewing experiences to this point. For example, last year Samsung teamed with Major League Baseball on a “Disrupting the MLB in 5G” campaign to launch a 5G-powered app that allowed viewers to adjust camera angles around the stadium on demand. Fans got to try the app during the National League Championship Series and World Series on Fox. The campaign resulted in 5,300 app downloads among Android users with 5G-enabled phones, as well as 14-point lift in ad recall, an 11-point increase in brand memorability and a 3-point hike in purchase intent for Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold2 5G. Footen noted that esports have served as an initial proving ground for similar concepts. However, at the moment, even lower tiers of major sports have had difficulty implementing them. Whether it’s gaps in streaming ad space or dropped sideline feeds during online broadcasts, the lack of 5G delivery and cloud-based production has made digital broadcasts—never mind customization—a work in progress. “Where there are some issues associated with getting rights or getting the right amount of ad load, the core of the issue is technological,” Footen said. “We who work on this have been doing this for probably the last five years now, so almost all of the broadcasters are either already in the cloud for all their distribution or will be in the next few years.” Twitch and AT&T Partner on Discovering the Next Generation of Streamers Pandemic pressure If it weren’t for Covid-19, Footen added, that transition likely would’ve taken longer. When sports paused and returned with heightened concerns about safety and social distance, enclosing production teams in trucks no longer seemed like a good idea. Networks began moving some of that production into digital space, while slowly retiring the rest of its costly equipment for a more cost-efficient cloud-based approach. As it has with many aspects of daily life, the pandemic is forcing sports broadcasters and marketers to do more with less. When you have a game that restrictions prevent people from attending but encourage watching at home, it pushes entities like Deloitte and NTC to find ways to alter ads on in-stadium screens to more personalized spots during a broadcast. If there’s a disgruntled athlete taking out frustrations on a sponsor’s product—as Cristiano Ronaldo did to Coca-Cola bottles during last year’s Euro 2020—a company suffering from pandemic-slowed sales might want their brand removed or altered. In Footen’s view, that’s just the least of what advancing technology can do for leagues, advertisers and other broadcast entities willing to step out of the truck. “If I have a particular drink that the players are drinking on the sidelines, I can influence the audience by changing what that drink is in real time as it goes out,” Footen said. “That's not crazy science fiction. And we can do it in real time as well.” Softball Shows Off Its Marketing Power and Potential

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Inside Deloitte's Game Plan to Personalize Sports Broadcasts

Acquisition of NTC brings networks a step closer to customizable coverage—and the marketing that supports athletics

Jason Notte

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