Thus far, the IPL viewership numbers are a critical success metric in determining the value for sponsors, advertisers, teams and brands associated with India’s biggest sports league. However, going beyond this mere number, STAR Sports TV and FanPlay IoT commissioned a path-breaking case study and sports tech pilot, engineered by HYPE Sports Innovation (IL), that establishes a unique way to capture the “Authentic Sentiment” of fans.
HYPE Sports Innovation is the largest global ecosystem for SportsTech comprising over 200 teams, leagues, and federations, and has the largest equity-holding portfolio of Sports Tech startups to date. As part of the HYPE Sports Innovation GVA 3.0 Program, FanPlay IoT offered its unique Neuro-marketing based fan engagement solution to Star Sports. With the guidance of HYPE Sports Innovation, FanPlay IoT and Star Sports designed a pilot around India’s biggest Sports league – The TATA IPL 2023.
FanPlay IoT’s FanNeuroTM is an IoT-based Fan engagement platform that captures the natural fan language in real-time. A Fan’s natural ways of emoting are shouting, clapping, going silent or commenting about the match, but beyond all that, the reaction from the heart shows how excited, angry, neutral, or disappointed a fan is during the moments of LIVE sporting action.
During the recently concluded TATA IPL 2023, Star Sports, with Fanplay IoT’s platform, captured the heart rate of fans while they were watching the game. The findings are “heartening” to say the least.
The #DilKiBaat campaign, which centred around Heartbeats, added to STAR TV’s #ShorOn #GameOn campaign and collected over 27 Million heartbeats during the course of the IPL season. Fans of Chennai hit the highest number here too.
As part of the campaign, multiple watch parties were organized across different cities where fans were given the wearable tech and fan engagement platform to cheer on.
Beyond the watch parties, a web browser-based fan engagement site was developed, which also captures fan emotions seamlessly without wearable tech. Thereby reaching to a larger scale.
Needless to say, we all knew how the action unfolded and went to the T, even in the grand finale. The finals were definitely an emotional roller coaster for fans, with the graphs going haywire until the last ball.
With deeper insights into Fans’ behaviour and emotions, enabled by FanPlay’s platform,
Fans can etch their memory as a token and have it as their collectables perpetually, going beyond generations. They will have the ability to pick up their favourite moments of the game and they can get their heart rate graph for that particular moment. Not to forget, this will heavily arm them with bragging rights as well.
From Star Sports’ point of view, this type of engagement gave scope to a whole new dimension of neuro-marketing in the Indian sports ecosystem, where sponsors and brands can go ultra-vernacular in targeting the emotional state of fans. This will enhance the recall and conversion rates to levels unimaginable by today’s marketing standards.
The REAL-TIME sentiment of fans, coupled with Star Sports’ ability to dynamically feed adverts in LIVE broadcasts is going to be a game changer in the way ad inventories and sports tournament packages are sold.
