Inside the NFL’s AI innovation hub testing new marketing strategies

As the NFL pursues a long-term strategy to grow its fan base, the league is relying more heavily on an internal think tank to power its most technologically advanced marketing experiments. The innovation team, composed of marketers, executives, data analysts and others, has become hyper-focused on using AI to replicate and scale content for global audiences by tailoring messaging to their preferences. For example, if the NFL determined that German audiences loved Travis Kelce, then it could serve them a Travis Kelce-themed ad. But if the league found that London-based audiences preferred Patrick Mahomes, it would need a way to swap out the ad’s content in real time, including the images and text, said Chi Ogbuehi, the NFL’s VP of marketing technology and consumer products. The process needs to be replicated for other cultures tuning into the league, from Brazil to Tokyo. “One of the quickest ways to do that is through AI and generative AI,” Ogbuehi said. Football marketing news Tracking Super Bowl, NFL and college brand moves Read more here The hub is in its second year of operation, and is still in testing. Eventually, the league could use the hub to apply emerging technologies, including AI, to strengthen engagement and provide precise ways of targeting the NFL’s core products to fans, including promoting NFL+ and tickets to games, an NFL executive recently told Ad Age. The early stages of these innovation efforts coincide with other activations from the league, outside the hub, which are already reaching fans. This week, Amazon unveiled in-broadcast, AI-powered features developed with the NFL that will be viewable during Amazon Prime’s broadcast of “Thursday Night Football,” which begins tonight. Separately, the league announced an integration of its intellectual property into a popular Roblox game. Also, last week it integrated social community features on the websites of its 32 teams, in partnership with engagement platform Arena. The NFL’s tech experiments go beyond textbook generative AI products like simple text-to-image tools. Language translation, for example, is key to the league’s engagement with diverse audiences. Through the hub, the NFL is testing solutions that can quickly exchange the language of content in media, even in markets that the league has not yet formally entered, Ogbuehi said. These include languages common in Latin America, right-to-left languages such as Arabic, and non-Romance languages such as Chinese. The translation tech can even mimic different tones of voice. Also read: How the NFL is engaging global audiences As the NFL experiments with different AI tools, its goal is to narrow the options to one or several technology vendors that it can use reliably going forward. It could strike a formal partnership with the vendors, although it is possible the league sticks to a less formal relationship that hinges on the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), said Ogbuehi. The NFL is considering both emerging AI players and more established companies, Ogbuehi said. Giants such as Google and Microsoft have typically furnished big brands with AI technology, such as Microsoft’s recent multiyear deal with Coca-Cola. Microsoft already has a standing partnership with the NFL with respect to communication platforms, and its access to OpenAI models could make it an enticing vendor. But this week the league also expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services, a deal that revolves around AI. Ogbuehi confirmed that Amazon is one of the vendors the hub is considering. Meanwhile, smaller AI providers have been jostling for a piece of the pie that is coming from major brands, media companies and sports leagues such as the NFL. Anthropic recently partnered with WPP for its largest implementation within the ad industry. Also, this week, AI search platform Perplexity launched its biggest ad campaign yet—a football-themed ad that aired during “Monday Night Football.” Whichever partner, or partners, the NFL chooses, it plans to not only generate custom content for global audiences, but to also scale this media across all of its digital channels. Social media will be a destination, Ogbuehi said, as will marketing across text messaging, push notifications and email, and there will be personalization within app and web experiences. The NFL’s partnership with Arena, while developed outside of the hub, offers a glimpse into how custom content could be offered to fans. Arena developed a game feed on each of the league’s 32 team’s websites, as well as an AI-powered chat column where fans can communicate with one another, as they might on Discord. The NFL is able to glean fan insights from data collected by Arena, such as their social interests and purchase intent, which it can use to target ads for its various products, said Paulo Martins, Arena’s founder and CEO. “We’re identifying the hardcore fans and bringing them to the bottom of the funnel,” Martins said. The bottom of the funnel is when consumers are at their closest point to taking an action, such as making a purchase, driven there through a marketing campaign or promotion. The NFL’s hub is not just an incubator for marketing experiments, however. Given the cross-functional makeup of the internal team, it looks at how technology can be applied to enhance all corners of the NFL’s business. For instance, through an idea fleshed out in the hub, the NFL is now testing tracking technology from Sony that aims to replace the chain gangs that measure the yards to gain on each down. Non-marketing departments play a role in developing marketing ideas, too, which is why the hub resembles a think tank—not too dissimilar from the tech think tanks that exist inside agencies. When an idea begins in the hub, it must pass through a vetting process conducted by committees made up of executives, technologists, data analysts, security personnel and more, Ogbuehi said. The hope is that any idea that successfully makes it to the other end will be a process deemed viable by more people outside the department that conceived it. The ideas themselves often depend on inter-departmental efforts. A marketing experiment focused on using AI to scale content could rely on tons of data, which will inevitably come from efforts led by Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer. Ad Age recently spoke with Ballew about his department’s new data initiative, which has helped the league compile detailed understandings of tens of millions of fans. This is where Ogbuehi comes in. “We see the fan, we know the fan—how do we meaningfully engage that fan in context? These three [objectives] are really joined at the hip,” Ogbuehi said.

Inside the NFL’s AI innovation hub testing new marketing strategies

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