Of all the column inches in all the world, a sizeable chunk have been dedicated to artificial intelligence over the past 12 months. Spurious claims by SaaS providers that fall apart with minimal scrutiny, think pieces on the chances of sentience, arguments for AI saving the world – or ending it… you’ll have seen them all.
Putting all the noise and hype aside for a minute, one thing that is for sure is that AI is most definitely here and it’s here to stay. From creative concepts to community engagement, AI is already omnipresent in our humble little world of sports marketing. The question is no longer ‘if’ or ‘why’ rather; ‘who, what, where, when and how’.
As the pace of technological change accelerates, the sports marketing rulebook is no longer just being rewritten — in many instances, it’s being deleted. In this blog, Daniel Macaulay, Founder of sports marketing consultancy Brandwave, challenges many of the sports industry’s most established beliefs. Using recent case studies from Nike and Nutella to Levis and Amazon, Daniel explores whether marketing truly is evolving through AI or indeed, being replaced by it altogether…
Short, sharp shocks
Ask me the question: what do you do at Brandwave? and you may see me struggling to give you a straight answer. That’s because marketing is closely linked to technology and technology is by it’s very nature, inherently, always evolving. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say that at Brandwave, we have to evolve both ‘what’ we do and ‘how’ we do it 20-30% a year just to stay on top of technological changes and advancements.
As marketeers, we dwell in a highly Darwinistic subculture or to put it plainly – we must evolve or we must die. To this point, many the print & design agencies that I looked up to some 25 years ago at some point, slowed or stopped evolving and soon after, became extinct.
Although technology is always evolving, I believe that it doesn’t always evolves in a straight line. The way I see it, technology evolves in a series short sharp shocks. That is to say, that for successive succinct periods of time, everything gets thrown up in the air and when it lands back down on terra firma, we find ourselves in a new reality. For example, the time between the Wright brothers achieving first powered manned flight and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon was a mere 66 years.
Many of us have lived through these short sharp shocks of technological evolution ourselves: the proliferation of the internet, the rise of e-commerce, social media mania, a global pandemic… Each has brought about a fundamental technological and resultant sociological step-change.
And so it is with AI… Same same but in fact, very different because AI is as the name suggests; intelligent in itself. AI learns and grows exponentially faster with every day that goes by and now the genie is outta the bottle, it ain’t going back.
Perhaps more than ever before in human history, AI is another of those moments. A short, sharp shock that reshapes the sports marketing industry and the question: what do you do at Brandwave?
AI’s first playground
As marketers, we are generally a pretty creative bunch. We’re also data-obsessed. And, there’s a fair chunk of change allocated to marketing. That’s a powerful trifecta if you’re developing a data technology with practically limitless scope.
So, it’s little wonder that the fledgling AI industry settled on marketing use cases straight outta the gate. That means we marketeers are now among some of the most prolific users of AI in the world ; 91% of marketers already utilise AI at work, and nearly 50% believe it will enhance their professional performance moving forward.
That means you’re likely pretty au fait with AI already. 3 in 5 marketers say they use it outside of work, but it’s likely many are using it without realising. AI has quietly crept into various aspects of our lives. I wouldn’t consider myself a tech wiz but I’m practically part cyborg already. To this point, my winning smile was created using Invisalign AI measuring microscopic movements in my teeth. For my diabetes, I use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) in my left arm that’s linked via BlueTooth to an AI insulin pump in my right arm. All of this is linked to my smart phone, onto my smartwatch, and then onto CarPlay in my van. This data is all uploaded to the Cloud and can be analysed by doctors and/or sports coaches anywhere in the world.
The new brand-audience dynamic
Around a third of UK adults now use wearables daily, and the data from those wearables fuels content, community, and customer experiences. We share our scores, compare performance, and influence each other’s buying habits. That same user-generated content also feeds directly back into product development. ‘Going viral’ now reorders product roadmaps.
Our data obsession and the data technology driving it is transforming the brand-audience relationship in real time.
Here’s the thing, AI it’s not just about ChatGPT, recording our meeting minutes, or reshaping our professional workflows; it’s reshaping our habits, all aspects of our personal lives, and ultimately, our expectations as consumers, as well.
Fad or fixture?
As marketers, we’re on the front lines. So it can be tempting to think the rest of the world is as gung-ho about AI as we are. Ogilvyhas already pegged us firmly in the ‘value creation’ era of AI. They reckon we’re rethinking the impossible, rather than improving the old stuff.
And by-and-large, I’d have to agree. But I’m a marketer. I’m already leveraging AI for efficiency gains, to create new formats and expressions, and generate insights from complex datasets.
At Brandwave, if we need to localise an AI website for audiences from São Paulo, Nairobi, or Seoul, we can do that in a matter of days. A voiceover in six languages? We can deliver that within a week now, too. These are practical, accessible tools — they’re accelerators – and it’s easy to see why we’ve adopted them so readily.
The analyst firm, Gartner isn’t quite as bullish on AI as we are. It has seen its fair share of short, sharp shocks – it had the wherewithal to predict the dot-com bubble – and it thinks another crash is imminent.
Famed for its ‘hype cycles’, which chart the highs and lows of adoption, Gartner’s Gen AI cycle puts us at the highest point on the roller coaster — the peak of inflated expectations — about to fall rapidly into the trough of disillusionment. Basically, we’re going to get clobbered by a reality that doesn’t quite live up to the hype. Think Metaverse and NFTs.
It’s a good reminder that, as marketers, our experience of this technology is far from universal. AI – and gen AI in particular – is still a clusterfuck.
Some campaigns are brilliant, others give consumers the ick quicker than a LinkedIn post that starts ‘Do you want to co-invest with me?’
Artificially intelligent, creatively human
Suffice to say, there is a broad range of usage cases of AI in sports marketing from the utterly inspired to the truly terrible…
Let’s start with a look at the bloody brilliant. The AI marketing use cases that really push both technological and creative boundaries.
Nike
If you’ve spent any length of time with me or caught some of my past musings, you’ll know I’m a card-carrying Nike fanboy. So, of course, any example of exceptional AI use is gonna start with them.
Creating an AI masterpiece, Nike’s ‘Never Done Evolving’ campaign pitted the 17-year-old Serena Williams who played the 1999 U.S. Open against a 35-year-old Serena Williams at the 2017 Australian Open, showcasing how she evolved as a player. The campaign modelled Serena’s style in each match from archive footage, creating two avatars that battled it out over 5,000 simulated matches, which culminated in a final, AI-generated match broadcast on YouTube.
What I love about this campaign aside from it’s highly ambitious nature, is that it’s really a best case use example of how we can utilise AI in creativity. It doesn’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.
Yes, AI did something amazing here that we could never have dreamed of doing without it, but the concept behind it was still incredibly human.
What I take from this is that AI still needs a designer’s hand to get it over the line. This is a great example of how the technology enhances creativity — but doesn’t replace it.
Heinz
I’ll also sneak a non-sports example in – mainly because it’s one of my favourite F&B brands when it comes to marketing (and beans). For this campaign, the folks at Heinz asked the image generator DALL-E 2 to simply ‘draw ketchup’, and the results were unmistakably Heinz pretty much every time. Heinz also asked their fans to share ketchup image prompts too, and again, the results were quite unmistakably Heinz. The best images featured in a print and digital campaign that became the first to use visuals generated entirely by AI. The upshot… Heinz wins the ketchup wars. Competition demolished by AI
This campaign works for so many reasons; it’s incredibly original. It cements Heinz brand position as the ‘Kings of Ketchup’. DALL-E2 is a fairly standard AI image generator making this campaign broadly accessible to all for audience engagement. The list goes on…
Levi’s – AI models
Again, one of my favourite non-endemic sports brands when it comes to creating ninja-level marketing campaigns. Levi’s is using AI to tackle multiple issues around both diversity and representation. In marketing world, ‘If I can see it, I can be it’ roughly translates into ‘if I can see someone who looks a bit more like me, I’m a lot more likely to buy’. In a digital world largely populated by Adonis-like Hollister models, I think we can all relate to this to some extent.
With this challenge very much in mind, Levis is currently trialing the use of AI models to reflect a much broader range of body types, skin tones, and identities across thousands of product SKUs. It’s doing so in partnership with digital fashion studio Lalaland and, while neither have disclosed exactly how the interface will work, it’s likely shopping channels will combine user provided data, such as the size they’re shopping for, with things like IP address to infer regional norms and present models more in line with the user’s aesthetic.
This campaign shows me that correctly utilising AI, brands can now meet people where they are in their own language, on their terms and win loyalty, not just traffic.
It also means we can now localise marketing assets at scale without burning through precious marketing budgets.
Artificially intelligent, ethically questionable
Comfort levels differ wildly with any digital transformation, and the nature of our work means marketing and PR campaigns have been among the first to test the boundaries, defining those that are socially acceptable… and those that quite evidently, aren’t.
NBC
News that sporting channel NBC will use AI to recreate legendary NBA broadcaster Jim Fagan’s voice received a mixed response. Some embraced the nostalgia, some worried his family hadn’t signed off on it, but most were concerned about whether this would limit opportunities for new talent coming in. What happens if legends literally never die?
Ultimately. this campaign raised many relatively new both ethical and legal questions around copyright and consent postmortem.
Google – AI Kids
Google’s Gemini campaign showed a little girl using AI to write a fan letter to Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The backlash was immediate; AI shouldn’t do heartfelt sentiment from children. Google pulled the ad, but didn’t manage to dodge the negative headlines.
While this campaign didn’t raise any new legal issues, it certainly raised moral ones around losing our humanity to AI.
Just because we can doesn’t necessarily mean that we should and Google learned this lesson the hard way…
Calvin Klein – AI influencers
Speaking of iffy, the influencer Lil Miquela has millions of followers. She’s fronted campaigns for the likes of Prada and UGGS. She’s also completely AI-generated. As part of her creation, she was given a backstory that included a controversial assault in the back of a ride-share. When the avatar shared that storyseemingly out of the blue on her social platforms, it went down about as well as you’d expect, very clearly crossing an ethical line.
Lil Miquela also recently fronted a campaign for Calvin Kline in which she appeared to be kissing the real life model, Bella Hadid. The campaign stumbled on two issues:
1. Bella Hadid is human/ real and also straight. Calvin Klein were accused of queer bating.
2. Bella is making out with an AI influencer which some people found even more offensive.
In short, a brand together with a popular AI influencer crossed an ethical AI line largely because there’s a huge difference between representation and appropriation — and that applies just as much in AI storytelling.
So, what’s next?
So what on earth is next??
Elon Musk says “In the future, there will be no phones. Just Nuralinks.”
I think the answer varies depending on who you are asking. I also think that sometimes you have to look backwards before you can look forward. In on of my favourite books about the past and future of human evolution, Homo Deus (the sequel to Sapians), Yuval Noah Harari predicts the next stage of human evolution will be biological integration with technology. I’m certainly on my way towards that and while we’re not uploading our consciousness to the cloud just yet al la Black Mirror, we are syncing a frightening amount of our lives to machines.
There’s also the much debated question of ‘The Singularity’. AI data might be ubiquitous, but right now, it’s mainly collecting in silos. Many experts agree that the real developmental leap comes when all the various intelligent systems in our lives – our cars, wearables, chessboards, and fridges – start cross-pollinating and talking to each other. That’s the moment when AI stops being a set of tools and becomes an ecosystem that can learn, predict, and act. For fans of early 90’s sci-fi, thats when SkyNet becomes ‘self-aware’ hopefully with less ‘I’ll be back’ consequences.
That next phase of integrated AI ecosystem will facilitate a whole new channel for engagement. In sports, we’re already heading toward hyper-personalised fan experiences. One day, in the not too distant future, you’ll be watching Tiger Woods tee off in a red Nike cap. Think, ‘nice cap’, tap the screen or blink an eye, and that exact cap will arrive on your doorstep in your size in short order.
This technology won’t just be embedded in marketing campaigns, it’ll be embedded in life.
Soooo…artificially intelligent or already irrelevant?
AI is massive. More massive than most of us dare to imagine. I believe that we are just beginning to wake-up in the dawn of the AI Age which will likely bare witness to some of the most dramatic technological and sociological changes in human history.
Whether you find that exciting or terrifying or both, I feel that AI still has plenty more short, sharp, shocks to deliver.
But as impressive as that sounds, it’s worth remembering a few things that this blog has demonstrated:
- Right now, AI isn’t a pilot. It’s a damn good co-pilot, but it has no place in the marketing driving seat – yet!
- Use AI technology well, and it will enhance your creativity. Use it poorly, and it will seriously damage your brand.
- We each have a choice now: repeat what we’ve always done in a world that’s rapidly progressing beyond that, or prepare to become a footnote in the marketing history books.
And so, over to you dear reader… are you effectively embracing AI or are you increasingly becoming already irrelevant?
Got feedback or comments or want to chat about how Brandwave can use AI to enhance your marketing? Email: [email protected]
