IBM introduced a new brand platform, ‘Let’s Put Smart To Work,’ through its sponsorship of The Masters and places its Watson supercomputer at the heart of a utility-led creative approach that generates personalised highlights of the golf tournament.
For the 2018 tournament, IBM is enabling fans to have an automated, personalised highlight reel service available on Masters.com and across the various Masters apps.
Enabled by Watson, the ‘My Moments’ feature offers golf lovers a customized digital experience based around their own favourite players (as well as around the previous time they visited one of the Masters digital platforms).
The feature, which uses IBM Watson’s enterprise-grade artificial intelligence, aims to inform each individual viewer/user on the moments that they care most about within the context of the overall tournament and the players they select as their favorites.
It also features a spoiler-free mode to catch you up on the action without spoiling the ending.
As well as the ‘My Moments’ activation strand, Watson also helps The Masters’ own editorial team work at scale by watching all the live-stream video and separating the potential clips by recognizing the beginning and end of a particular player’s shot.
Watson identifies the player in the clip, the hole he is on, and which shot he is taking and then further analyses the video for player gestures, emotion, commentator and roar of the crowd and determines an overall excitement level for the shot.
The activation marketing programme is fronted by sponsorship spot focusing on the tournament and on how IBM and The Masters work in tandem to develop this personalised app-based experience.
A utility promoted across IBM’s digital and social channels.
New for this year, the Masters app is using IBM Watson to curate personalized highlight reels. https://t.co/PCIflNKOJV #TheMasters pic.twitter.com/bFcqhNHq5s
— IBM (@IBM) April 5, 2018
Further elements of its Masters activation ranged from hospitalityprogrammes, web-based support, as well as cloud led commercials
and on-course action related creative pieces.
And the Green Jacket goes to @PReedGolf! Congrats on your victory at #TheMasters. #IBMsports pic.twitter.com/ajN6cbaRZo
— IBM Sports (@IBMSports) April 8, 2018
Meanwhile, running simultaneously to the tournament-specific creative assets, the wider new brand Platform campaign (by Creative Works) invites users to ‘put smart to work’ in order to transform healthcare, retail, energy and other industries by applying IBM’s Watson, cloud computing, blockchain technology and security services to change how we fight disease and hackers, produce coffee and save rhinos.
This marketing theme runs through IBM’s entire business – from its 2018 annual report and its Think conference, to seven new television spots that are all running during the Masters.
All of the ads aim to encourage viewers to click through to the initiative’s microsite to learn more at https://ibm.co/2JdFIix
The ‘Let’s Put Smart to Work’ ads each address a different element of smart technology, including how farmers are putting smart to work using satellite imagery, weather data and AI to help monitor soil moisture levels and increase their yields, and how security experts are putting smart to work to protect businesses from cyber attacks.
A creative theme in the campaign is the use of ‘thought rays’ or ‘smart rays,’ which were introduced with the “smarter planet” theme in 2008 and feature in the Watson avatar to signal Watson as the AI for smarter business.
Comment:
IBM, which has worked with the Masters for more than 20 years, uses its tournament tie-up and many of its other sports property partnerships to showcase the event to fans around the world and in recent years it has focused much of this work around its cognitive computing skills and services.
Indeed, Watson has been a key feature of IBM’s sports sponsorship activation (such as its recent Wimbledon work – see case study) and this year’s activation follows on from the brand’s previous Watson led work around The Masters – such as its 2016 campaign fronted by golf icon and IBM ambassador Tom Watson (see case study).
One of a small group of Masters commercial partners, IBM sits alongside AT&T, Delta, plus Rolex and UPS, as well as long-time broadcaster CBS as one of the few official sponsors of a tournament that aims to set itself apart from the rest by minimising its association with commercial alliances and tie-ups.
There are two opinions about sponsorship and The Masters: one that the tournament is a property controlled beacon of traditional values ensuring the tournament isn’t ruined by corporate logos and marketing machinery, the other that it is an exclusive, elitist, sexist, old-fashioned 300-strong private members club run event based on secret handshakes resulting in non-negotiable private archaic advertising deals.
Which version is true?
Well, both are of course!
Links:
IBM
https://www.youtube.com/user/IBM
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ibm
Creative Works
The Masters
https://twitter.com/TheMasters
https://www.facebook.com/TheMasters/
