With global sponsorship budgets alone reaching $60 billion in 2016 and Gartner predicting that CMOs will soon spend more on IT than CIOs, financial executives have even more reasons to scrutinize marketing spending plans closely.
As the next budgeting cycle comes around, marketing leaders are facing increasing pressure to back their investment choices with solid return on investment (ROI) metrics.
Brand visibility measurement in TV content has long been relying on time-consuming manual tracking. With the proliferation of channels, content versions, and audience fragmentation, manual measurements cannot scale with the increased magnitude of the task. As a result, branding professionals are often left guessing the impact sponsorship investments have on their business without sound data-driven analysis to back their choices.
Assessing the Real Value of Sponsorship Investments
To help you address these challenges, we have created SAP Brand Impact, a new cloud-based application powered by SAP Leonardo Machine Learning, that automatically analyzes large volumes of videos. Specifically, it makes use of innovations in computer vision and machine learning technologies to detect brand assets in moving images and measures their exposure in term of time, on-screen size, location, and additional parameters that influence viewer recognition. In this way, you can rely on cost-effective, scalable, and auditable brand assets exposure measurements to guide your sponsorship investment strategy.
Another advantage with SAP Brand Impact is the ability to leverage its results together with other business data to determine the impact of your brand strategy on your business. For example, you can use your current business intelligence environment to connect sales and financial data in your SAP systems or your website statistics with the results of your brand exposure analysis. In this way you can evaluate how your sponsorship activities influence your customer responses. This is possible because SAP Brand Impact offers APIs that make it easier to correlate brand exposure data with other data, over specific time intervals.
Strengthening Partner Sponsorship Engagement at Maccabi Tel Aviv
While it is intuitive to imagine that blue chip brands, media agencies, and broadcasters are the primary consumers of brand exposure analytics, all businesses that want to attract and retain new sponsorships can greatly benefit from them as well. This is especially true when the solution is fully automated and easy to adopt. Take the example of Maccabi Tel Aviv Basketball Club, which has distinguished itself on the court for more than 40 years by winning multiple European championships. They wanted to get tangible insights into the brand exposure their partners were getting at team’s games. They were convinced these insights would then provide a valuable tool to help these partners accurately assess the effectiveness of their sponsorship investments.
SAP Brand Impact was the ideal choice for the club because it could provide near-real-time results automatically, did not require substantial upfront investments, and provided advanced metrics, such as the ability to combine time and area size exposure.
As Yaron Talpaz, the club’s chief marketing officer, put it, the results speak for themselves: “We are impressed by the solution’s capabilities, precision and speed, and see it as a great potential tool for our sales efforts, adding data and numbers to media exposure previously deemed un-measurable.”
At SAP, we have invested a good deal in delivering the intelligence embedded in SAP Brand Impact. Especially important in achieving our goals has been our partnership with NVIDIA that has allowed us to take advantage of the latest advancements in GPU technology for running our proprietary computer vision algorithm and sophisticated model training mechanism.
SAP Brand Impact is now operational in our state-of-art data centers, running on the powerful, scalable infrastructure from NVIDIA and other vendors. To start your journey with SAP Brand Impact, visit sap.com/ML.
At SAPPHIRE NOW, come meet our team and join this session to explore in depth the benefits offered by the SAP Brand Impact application.
