AI is becoming ever more popular in mainstream media. With the likes of ChatGPT making its way onto the scene in late 2022, we are starting to realise how influential and important AI will be in our future lives. The reason AI is becoming a hot topic is the premises of how it works. The whole idea of AI is that it is constantly learning and developing, to an eventual point where it could predict peoples’ behaviours and actions through their interests and usual online activity. Now, I’m not saying AI could go full ‘Minority Report’, but it can help with hyper-personalising content and segmenting audiences.
Segmenting Audiences
Any business who is looking to attract an audience can benefit from audience segmentation. Although as a business you might have a specific target audience, you could further target audiences through breaking them down into smaller groups or sub-categories. Usually, the sub-categories are based on demographics such as age, gender, economics, location, or job role. However, depending on what your business does you can use any demographic to segment your audience. The practice of audience segmentation isn’t new. With the developing use of AI applications, it could make segmentation easier, quicker, and more concise.
When segmenting audiences, data is needed to understand their demographic and interests. With the help of AI applications, not only could you gather data more efficiently but also gather more in-depth information. AI could conduct a content and/or text analysis, finding which words your followers have used when talking about your specific industry. Understanding your audiences’ behaviours, interests and even language, will help with brand image and tone of voice. This is commonly done throughout marketing, but with the help of AI, there are endless opportunities to segment audiences and hyper-personalise your content. Which should see a return in fan engagement and potential revenue.
Content
With AI becoming so good at what it can do content wise, it has struck fear in some marketing professionals. However, there is no need, AI should be welcomed in content creation, as we can all admit there are jobs which should take minutes but for some reason take hours. This is where utilising AI’s capabilities will make content creation more efficient and personalised. The AI applications still need a human’s touch, after all it isn’t perfect (not yet anyway) but by cutting out those long-winded tasks you could save so much time, time you can use to create more content. With increased content creation you can begin to target a wider range of specific audiences. This will return an increase of overall engagement.
AI can be used to determine types of content that audiences are engaging with. By analysing your current data using AI application, you will be able to create content that fans are more likely to engage with. This will help to plan content and to analyse which content formats perform the best.
Hyper-personalisation
The main goal of audience segmentation is to create personalised content for your audience. Personalised content can increase audience engagement, as it means each audience segment will see content they personally enjoy. If their only seeing content they do not enjoy, the likelihood is they will unfollow or unsubscribe from the page.
How this can be used in sport
With the power of AI and its contribution to hyper-personalisation, it can be utilised in a way that will improve the fan experience for sport fans. AI can be used in a variety of ways to help improve the sport experience.
Personalised Commentary
There is nothing worse than watching the sport you love with an annoying commentator or one you dislike. We have all experienced it, sometimes so badly it has you reaching for the mute button. However, with AI there is the possibility to personalise commentary. By analysing fan behaviour, collecting data and commentary archives, AI could create commentary for live games that a specific to a certain audience. This could be targeted based off:
- Location- commentary in local accents or using native slang
- Age – using slang or different humour
- Gender – different voice
AI could also have different ‘level of fan’ options. I am not a rugby fan but if it’s on I will give it a watch, but when you are already trying to understand a sport, you aren’t in to, it can become even more difficult when you try to understand through commentary. AI could avoid this issue, it could ‘simplify’ the commentary for casual fans. By getting rid of the ‘one-size fits all’ commentary model, there is possibility to now only change how the commentators sound or talk but what they talk about. Some fans may enjoy more player gossip and personal news whereas some may enjoy the strategies.
Tailored Match Highlights
Match highlights are an important part of sport for any fan, they can be accessed just after the game and give you all the key events. Yet, there always seems to be a trend, especially in football highlights, where key moments or controversial events take place and the broadcaster gatekeeps it. This can be for many reasons but to mainly engage with a majority of fans. AI could determine the importance of key events and personalise the match highlights depending on the fan. Artificial intelligence is already creating live highlights during games of key moments just minutes after they have happened.
AI Football
It will not be long until AI is used an all forms of entertainment, and sport will be no different. Here at Nifty, we have used AI to create our own football league. We fed AI the right commands and let it do the work. We used ChatGPT to create our AI League. AI chose the players, the line-ups, who scored and any other match details. After this we used more AI tools to create match highlights and ‘stills’ from the game. Although there are some very questionable images, Nifty’s AI league is giving us a great insight into AI and the possibilities it holds.
The main goal of utilising AI is to create a memorable fan experience through optimum entertainment. By increasing the overall fan experience, AI can retain fans and create a sustainable revenue stream.
Using AI to segment you audiences provides endless possibilities for your content and allows for extreme hyper-personalisation. We will be releasing an entire eBook on how to hyper-personalise your content if you want to be the first to receive this content for free sign up to our newsletter.
