Pitchside wizardry helps brands to hit the target

LONDON // UAE fans watching Spanish football’s La Liga club matches on TV may be surprised to see the hoardings around the edge of the pitches showing adverts for firms such as the Bahraini fast-food chain Jasmi.

It may be more of a surprise to learn that only viewers in the Mena region can see those ads. That is thanks to digital replacement technology (DRT), which allows completely different advertising to be shown depending on where the match is being broadcast. Watch a game in this country and the advertising you see on perimeter hoardings can be completely different to the advertising fans will see in China, for example.

“We’ve had by far the most enquiries about what we do, how it’s done and can we buy it, from the Mena region,” says Charlie Marshall, the chief operating officer of Supponor, a market leader in the field of DRT, which has so far used its system at 250 commercial live events. Spain’s professional football league, La Liga, has been using Supponor for digital replacement advertising in the broadcast of its live matches for the last few years.

“I think it’s more noticeable when you’re watching a game and you see your local brands or language on the boards,” says Mr Marshall.

“You’re more likely to ask: ‘Why is Cars Online, a Mena website, advertising in that stadium? Why would they be sponsoring Real Madrid?’ And then you go: ‘hang on a minute, they’re not actually in the stadium, it’s virtual reality.’ It has a bigger impact simply because of the look and feel as no one is used to seeing local Mena languages on boards. Also the consumer market in Mena is more tech savvy and switched on.”

Digital replacement advertising works by superimposing virtual ads over what is actually being displayed on perimeter boards in the real world. Using a combination of hardware and software, the live broadcast stream is split for different markets and different region-specific advertising content is integrated into each feed. On a very basic level, the software replaces pixels within a video image. In effect, it is a more sophisticated version of the green screen technology used to superimpose maps behind a meteorologist during TV weather reports, for instance.

The technology has previously been used in football for clocks and basic scorecard graphics, but more recently there has been a growth in marketing graphics that seek to appear to viewers that a logo or advert is actually there on the pitch, perimeter board or behind the goal, says Mr Marshall.

The technology boosts revenues for rights holders who sell advertising at football matches because it allows them to increase their advertising and sponsorship inventory.

“This technology multiplies the inventory of rights we can market,” says Mario Bayarri, the chief executive at Mediapro Middle East, part of the Spain-based Mediapro, the global media group that owns international rights for La Liga. “Now we can sell one minute of advertising exposure during a match to five different markets, meaning that instead of 90 minutes of advertising space availability per match, we now can sell 450 minutes per match.”

DRT also opens up new opportunities for advertisers and sponsors. Using the technology, brands can customise their advertising content at a match for a specific territory, and feature language and products relevant to its audience.

“An airline can advertise special rates flying from China on the Chinese broadcasting of that match, and at the same time it can communicate rates from Europe on the European feed,” says Mr Bayarri. “All of this, on the same match, live and in real time.”

It also means advertisers or sponsors can use the minutes of ad space they have bought more effectively. Global brands that have bought global advertising inventory can advertise their different brands and products to specific audiences, and smaller regional brands can pay to advertise just to targeted local audiences.

“There’s a lot of wastage involved with buying global inventory,” says Mr Marshall. “The technology is a big benefit … whether you’re a brand or an agency, that ability to prove that every dollar spent is a dollar used, is important.”

Agrees Julie Audette, the associate director for marketing, communication and visitor services at the Abu Dhabi-based asset management organisation Miral. Miral has used digital replacement advertising at La Liga matches to promote Yas Island, and Ms Audette says it allows them to connect their brand to a regional audience while not wasting budget on global campaigns that reach non-relevant audiences.

“With a minimum of one minute per match of digiboard perimeter advertising at all Real Madrid and Barcelona away games, 100 per cent of our ads are viewed,” says Ms Audette. “La Liga is the most watched football league in the Mena region with games averaging around 15 million viewers. Some games go well above 25 million, according to figures from broadcaster beIN SPORTS. This offers Yas Island maximum exposure across the region while eliminating global overspill as we focus on this region, targeting residents of UAE and tourists of neighbouring countries.”

Advertisers in the Mena market have experimented more than most, says Mr Marshall. “With Barcelona and Madrid games in the last four years, the feeds from those games have been customised with Mena brands on the boards. They’re probably on the boards for about 50 per cent of the inventory. So about 50 per cent of the inventory is global brands because people still want to buy global, but about 50 per cent is local. What we see in Mena is lots of local language, local script, there’s a very different look and feel.”

While some viewers in the UAE have noticed DRT advertising in La Liga games, it is not yet clear what kind of impact it has. “Obviously I first noticed it was regional when I saw Arabic text and then realised it’s virtual when they show replays,” says Abdalla Mohamed, the vice president of the FC Barcelona Fan Club UAE. “The Arabic virtual ads don’t show on the replays. So you’re seeing the same incident a few seconds later but the ads now read in Spanish. This [relatively] new technology is quite impressive but in the end I barely pay attention to any of the advertising.”

While DRT is being refined all the time, there are still challenges to deploying it. While the quality of the transmission – in the past advertising occasionally masked players’ shirts or limbs – has been improved, says Mr Marshall, the key challenge is scalability of the technology.

“It’s high-end technology and it does have components that need to be at the ground, integrating with the host broadcaster,” he says. “Every environment is different, everyone uses different kit, different workflow, and we still need quite a lot of specialists to make the system work. It’s not as plug-and-play as it needs to be to get scale.”

Showing different advertising in different markets also calls into question who owns the inventory, says Mr Marshall. “The physical sign is owned by the club, ground or broadcaster, but if signage is put on in the broadcast, who owns it now? The broadcaster is the ultimate enabler. Getting a new commercial framework in place is taking a bit of time, which is why it’s rolling out in pockets with rights holders who have been able to align all these deployment issues.”

Finally, while some other football clubs in Europe have used the technology for one-off matches, or tested it behind closed doors, the reality is clubs have to forge alliances with internal and external stakeholders, including other clubs in their league, before deploying the system, says Mr Marshall.

In the next two years, he predicts that at least two of the other big European leagues – perhaps Germany and Italy – will join La Liga in using the technology, and that it will take between three and five years for the technology to become more scaleable, and more widely used as standard.

“There are some really big opportunities coming where this technology will really come alive … the Fifa World Cup in 2018 and the European Championships, Euro 2020,” says Mr Marshall. “That’s when you’ll really see the technology’s potential.”

In the meantime, watch this space – or at least, the one that is being shown to you.

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