The decision to cancel Wimbledon this year was not taken lightly, but when it was, the team at The All England Lawn Tennis Club wanted to build an experience for their fans that created a sense of anticipation and occasion – just like The Championships does uniquely every summer.
Territory: Global
Agency: In-House
Objectives
Background
In 2019 The Championships, Wimbledon saw 500,000 fans flock to the 42-acre site in south-west London, with 614m watching it on television and online and 60m visiting its wimbledon.com digital platform and mobile apps.
But in April a pandemic-enforced decision was taken to cancel the 2020 tournament (for the first time since WWII), so The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC) pivoted to its digital strategy to maintain engagement for fans and create compelling content for its broadcast partners.
This was spearheaded by offering a variety of new and reworked content to keep viewers at home engaged under the campaign title ‘Wimbledon Recreated’, with ‘The Greatest Championships’ the flagship of the campaign.
’Wimbledon Recreated’ launched on 10 June, asking fans to re-create some of the most memorable moments, matches, incidents and traditions of The Championships from its 142-year-old history.
‘The Greatest Championships’ was a collaboration with long-time technology partner IBM in the form of a free-to-access content campaign connecting with fans across what would have been the two weeks of the event, in a round-by-round retelling of some of Wimbledon’s best matches.
IBM’s association with Wimbledon dates back to 1990, and in December 2019 both parties signed a long-term partnership extension restructuring the tie-up around future innovation focusing on accelerating the historic Grand Slam’s digital transformation and driving value through the technology giant’s AI and cloud capabilities.
Under the new arrangement, the AELTC will invest in IBM’s capabilities in business and technology consulting, digital delivery and IBM Cloud and AI in order to deliver the foundational elements of the digital backbone of The Championships, while IBM established a dedicated work stream staffed by IBM and AELTC experts to bring innovation skills in-house under a one-team approach using the collective industry expertise of both parties.
It is a change that allowed the two parties to respond quickly to the cancellation of Wimbledon 2020 and pivot towards a digital solution within eight weeks of the announcement.
Aim
The AELTC’s pandemic insurance policy partly shielded it from the devastating financial damage faced by many other global sports events and also enabled it to focus on creating ‘The Greatest Championships’: which set out to combine the breadth of archive content options available to the AELTC with the live streaming capabilities of the digital and social environment, and to integrate supporting statistics, commentary and enhanced content.
The idea was to create something that felt a little like a live tournament which offered the modern sports fan a console type active engagement experience rather than sit back and watch old footage.
Thus the objective wasn’t to simply roll out loads of archive footage, but to create a two-week, engaging and unforgettable fan-centric initiative which would enable the AELTC to continue to promote the Wimbledon brand and build its reputation.
Other aims were to prompt debate and to create a Wimbledon celebration for fans missing the tournament they love and to provide ‘a positive connection to happier times for millions of tennis fans around the world’.
The initiative was not designed to be a substitute for live tennis at Wimbledon or on television, but did set out to continue to apply The Championships’ ‘expectations about quality’ and also to act as a form of development platform to explore future tournament-related engagement (with a focus on personalisation) and commercial opportunities which might be integrated into future events and initiatives.
“The enormity of the cancellation only really hit us when we received feedback from fans and so we felt pretty strongly that there was a great opportunity for us to create something for them,” explained AELTC Head of Communications, Content and Digital Alexandra Willis. “We were fascinated to see how much our fans were willing to come back and engage with the new content each day and how we make things more interactive, not just video on its own but how we can bring more immersive techniques to that video consumption, and I think a lot of us have been observing with interest what the gaming community has done in that regard.”
Activation
‘The Greatest Championships’ was a tournament digital recreation – running from 28 June to 13 July – based around a round-by-round video-led compilation of Wimbledon’s greatest matches which IBM digitally enhanced using AI/Cloud computing and which was distributed in real-time across multiple platforms – including Wimbledon’s digital and social channels as well on its broadcaster partner networks (led by the BBC) through what would have been the two weeks of the 2020 tournament.
To replicate the Wimbledon tournament and match experience, IBM took match video and added presentation pieces, player biographies, game-related statistics, point-by-point commentary, highlights clips, background stories and supporting photography, complete with a Wimbledon studio with talent, legends of the game and player interviews.
The planning phase was informed by a June 2020 YouGov survey of 2000 UK adults, commissioned by IBM/AELTC, which uncovered an appetite for re-watching classic sports matches and events: with 20% interested in doing so, of whom 89% believe new technology can play a part in making them more engaging (62% want remastered picture quality, 40% value modern statistics and 42% would like access to additional archive content).
The 10-strong IBM team had 8 weeks to put the content together and create the delivery platform using its AI expertise, data analytics skills and Cloud Computing capabilities.
The work ranged from de-blurring archive footage by bringing old video into the IBM Cloud and then applying bespoke AI modelling and other software techniques to remove unwanted artefacts and noise and sharpen the quality, assessing levels of on-court excitement based on crowd noise, allowing viewers to navigate the most enthralling portions of a match and even enabling fans to search for specific moments in archive footage and individual shot types.
“Could we have put videos online? Could we have put a level of enhancement to those? Yes, we could have done without AI, but it was AI which gave us that extra boost of quality,” explained Simon Boyden, IBM’s chief architect for Wimbledon. “It was clear that using an automated technology was something that we needed to be able to use in those timelines, as it really wasn’t feasible to have dozens of people having to manually edit the videos to the Wimbledon standard.”
To create a sense of anticipation ahead of the two-week initiative, the project was promoted with a campaign spanning digital and social content, as well as a PR push and ambassador support.
The BBC co-hosted ‘The Greatest Championships’ by showcasing the greatest matches across their linear broadcast during the 2020 fortnight, as well as hosting a range of fan experiences via social medial to interact with tennis fans.
For IBM, the suite of ‘The Greatest Championships’ content included assets for both internal and external audiences, as well as sales enablement, which showcased the gamut of technology and services IBM can offer at a time when so many businesses need them most.
This included an overarching hero documentary, and five short-form videos that focused on different aspects of the partnership’s commitment to innovation, featuring interviews with team members from the AELTC and IBM and incredible archive footage. These videos explored the passion, pride and commitment behind this year’s Wimbledon experience.
IBM and Wimbledon – The Greatest Championships (24 June)
IBM and Wimbledon – A Partnership With A Difference (25 June)
IBM and Wimbledon 2020 (25 June, 2020)
IBM and Wimbledon – In Pursuit Of Greatness (25 June)
IBM and Wimbledon – Strength From Flexibility (25 June)
IBM and Wimbledon – Innovating To Stay Ahead (25 June)
IBM and Wimbledon – The Greatest Championships (25 June)
IBM and Wimbledon – A Bold Vision (25 June)
Outcome
In just eight weeks, the joint IBM and Wimbledon team created a digital fan experience (amplified by broadcast partners) which filled the gap left by the fortnight and was, according to the property owner and partner ‘hugely positively received by Wimbledon fans all around the world’.
Amongst the key social statistics associated with IBM’s campaign promoting its Wimbledon partnership over the fortnight and its role in the project were a 11.4m total reach and more than 22,000 video views across its own channels.
A YouGov survey conducted following the 2020 fortnight indicated that the AELTC and IBM’s efforts ensured that Wimbledon maintained its reputation at 2019 levels, while the data demonstrated that even with no live coverage, the efforts attracted roughly 20% of Wimbledon’s usual audience.
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