These days, there’s a lot that inhibits brands from standing out: there’s an onslaught of competing content, user attention spans are shortening and budgets (not to mention time) are tight, making it difficult to rapidly produce and experiment with content that truly sticks.

That latter point is perhaps the most significant, because the biggest indicator of whether or not a user will engage with your content is whether it’s relevant to them. This desire of relevance elevates personalization beyond just a simple business need—in today’s market, it’s expected by users and required from brands.

This results in an imperative for efficient, cost-effective production that cuts through the noise and lands directly in front of the right consumer at the right time. A report recently released by SoDA showed that brands understand the need for personalization, with 83% of global business leaders increasing their investments in it for 2019, and nearly a third increasing their personalization budgets significantly.

People who touch an item feel an increased sense of ownership toward it—and personalized experiences are poised to persuade and push them over the edge of purchasing. Coca-Cola’s 2014 “Share a Coke” campaign was massively popular simply by creating a situation for customers to engage with the brand in a personal and social way. Marmite has taken a similar approach with its personalized jars, which provide a point of identification for the user.

But making strategic use of personalization remains a key challenge, particularly with production of content that benefits from personalization. In the same report, 55% of business leaders cited a clear focus on producing content quicker, and 47% sought greater cost-efficiency in content production.

But producing personalization at scale doesn’t have to be burdensome for brands. Through an integrated production process and technologies that enable dynamic delivery of content, organizations can produce a staggering volume of hyper-targeted content with ease—though it may require them to rethink their creative approach.

Levels of Personalization

Personalization in marketing certainly isn’t new, though most organizations operate on a relatively low level of personalization maturity. Rather than relying on basic data metrics like greeting a user by their name or using rules-based segmentation, brands can achieve best-in-class, highly relevant creative by optimizing content for omnichannel journeys (remembering the user along the way), integrating behavioral recommendations and applying AI to predictive personalization.

Now, don’t get too scared—all of the above likely sounds complicated, especially if you don’t yet have a distinct personalization or data strategy in place. But the good news is that personalization is less about the amount of data that you have, and more about what you do with the data. Minimal personalization can make a big impact.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a great example of an omnichannel campaign that reacts to user behaviors in a way that’s surprising to users, grabbing their attention by speaking directly to them. When Danish gum brand Stimorol decided to branch out into a new form of candy, they needed an awareness campaign that would challenge consumers to likewise extend outside their comfort zones. But how can you challenge someone to try something new without knowing what they habitually do? That’s where the creative opportunity behind personalization emerges.

We solved this problem by producing an integrated campaign that responds to user behaviors. Key to the campaign are YouTube bumper ads that respond to the types of videos that individual consumers are watching. While watching sports videos, for example, users may be treated to an ad that prompts them to try playing sports instead of just watching them.

These bumpers make use of one key data point—the type of content that users are watching—but does so in a clever way that immediately grabs viewer attention and prompts them to identify with the message in a personal way. While they might not be willing to change their own habits, trying a new Stimorol candy sounds like a sweet deal in comparison.

Personalization that Enhances, not Inhibits, Production Quality

Isn’t it unsustainable to produce several variations of content like the kind mentioned above? Not if you have already outlined the variables that differentiate individual pieces of content, or have clearly mapped out the touch points to be supported by an omnichannel campaign. We optimized production for the Stimoroll campaign by limiting it to a single-day shoot at a single location, resulting in over 150 format-ready deliverables capable of greeting the right consumers at the right place and time.

According to Salesforce, 57% of customers are happy to provide personal data in exchange for personalized marketing—which means data can inform awesome content and vice-versa. The key is that the data exchange should provide consumers with obvious value.

With the technology available today, brands can achieve an even greater level of relevance with their content, dynamically stitching together personalized content reactive to several data points. With Google Vogon, for example, brands can automatically translate a single base video into dozens of personalized variations on the fly, resulting in a high volume of unique videos that don’t push film crews to their limits or sacrifice quality.

Our dynamic video content for Booking.com was designed from two base videos: one featuring a giraffe browsing for travel destinations while another focused on a dog doing the same. But the type of animal featured is just one of several variables that enable 54 permutations tailored to hyper-specific segments and interests. These include the target market, different destinations found within those markets and a key passion (like shopping, dining or sightseeing) that provides added inspiration.

Both campaigns discussed above demonstrate how brands can efficiently target key segments of their audiences through personalization. Whether employing just one data point or many, personalization at scale can grab user attention and leave an indelible mark on them, and the right creative and production strategy enables brands to take advantage of these benefits without wearing themselves thin.

While an exciting game and sports-stars-turned-celebrities alone were once enough to raise an audience for broadcast sports, today’s leading brands strive to provide premier, engaging digital experiences that reach users through personalization and emerging tech. And we know, because MediaMonks recently went for the gold and made it onto the Hashtag Sports Engage 150 list, which features the top partners engaging consumers through sports and fan culture today.

Through our sports-related work—encompassing platforms, creative content and technical innovation—we’ve formulated a game plan for brands to better engage and deliver upon the needs of fans through sports. This includes more effective utilization of user data and investing in emerging tech solutions, allowing brands to bring their A-game to enhance spectatorship for fans both near and far away from the game.

Transform Spectators into Active Participants with Emerging Tech

We all know the joke of those who buy the biggest TV screen available before an important game, only to return it after hosting a viewing party. But today’s digital media allows brands to do more than just provide a larger-than-life picture; through emerging tech, they can provide entirely new experiences that significantly improve spectatorship through heightened immersion.

A premier platform achieving this is the 2018 Webby Award-winning Red Bull Air Race for Google Daydream, which takes users on a thrilling ride aboard a virtual airplane that follows actual flight paths from real races. Giving users full control to look wherever they please, the experience makes them feel as if they’re really there.

But VR lets you do more than let users feel present in the moment. “The benefit something like AR has over 360-degree video is that it’s a platform,” says Robert-Jan Blonk, Senior Interactive Producer at MediaMonks, noting the amount of on-screen data present to the user. “In this case, we built a platform with pilot info, race standings and different locations where races are held, which users can go back and replay.”

This added level of autonomy is powerful for fans who want to be part of the action. “Sports fans want to feel like they have a role in the game and aren’t just bystanders,” says Emily Veraart, Senior Digital Strategist at MediaMonks. While Red Bull Air Race users don’t influence the race directly, interactive toggling of the camera lets them experience the event in their preferred way—whether it be the middle of the fray or at a safe, omniscient distance.

For MediaMonks Operations Manager Donny Hofman, this level of interactivity is integral to the experience.  “The most interesting thing about an experience like this is the freedom you can give to users,” he says. “You can potentially get anywhere in the action that you want—and where you can’t place a camera in real life, you can in VR.” That latter point describes how emerging tech can enhance sports spectatorship through entirely new perspectives: “It’s a rediscovery of something you’re familiar with,” says Hofman.

Reach Fans with Targeted Content and Personalization

The sports industry encompasses several different parties, each of whom has their own fans and content: teams, federations, individual players and industry-adjacent influencers. This makes the industry ripe for producing always-on content.

During the Rio Olympics, we produced with Google Zoo a platform to deliver content to sports fans throughout the Games. Designed for both online fans and those visiting Rio de Janeiro to attend in-person, the platform integrated various forms of content (like timely updates and summaries from some of the region’s most influential YouTube content creators, the Castro brothers) onto a map of the city. In addition to providing relevant spatial information in this way, the platform surfaces up personalized content responsive to how they interact with the platform, like recommending content based off behavioral habits and viewing preferences.

The benefits to better understand fans are measurable. According to MightyHive’s Data Confident Marketer report, data-confident marketers’ success “is attributed to becoming more customer-centric: they’re able to apply first-party data in ways that help them understand who their customers are, what motivates them, and how digital advertising plays a role in their purchasing decisions.” Such confidence in their data allows brands to identify which information fans seek, where and when—and which partners make the best sense for engaging with fans through supplementary content.

This level of personalization, paired with forging partnerships with content creators and influencers, is ideal for delivering upon changing user expectations for how to consume sports. “With sports, there’s a bigger generational divide in user behavior,” says Veraart. “Baby boomers and millennials are used to watching sports with their family, but Gen Z doesn’t have that relationship with how they watch sports.” According to Veraart, much of this shift is informed by the constant discussion happening on social media, as well as an abundance of statistics and data available for the most avid fans to track. Brands can meet this need with a content strategy that offers a sliding scale of data and content tailored to fans’ individual preferences.

Engage User Needs through Contextual Design

When developing a digital platform for sports consumption, carefully consider the context in which users will interact. Consider micro-moments that prompt users to engage in the first place: the sports tourist attending a big gaming event in town, the stats-obsessed fan, the user who simply wants to see what games are playing at the height of the season. “How you guide the user through a schedule is a key example of the types of challenges a sporting federation may face,” says Joeri Lambert, Business Monk at MediaMonks. “Another is how you apply the data that you have to alert the user of games or information that they want to see.”

One crucial consideration in how to best support user context is whether the platform is accessed via mobile or desktop. With the All of Brazil Plays platform, for example, the mobile experience was tailored more toward location-based information for those attending the Games who needed to know where to go, and when. On desktop, meanwhile, users were treated to their personalized newsfeed of recap content, perfect for those catching up on a day’s many events.

Marrying data with digital creative—whether it be a digital content platform or emerging tech—is a smart strategy for brands to reach sports-obsessed and average fans alike. From helping users keep up with their favorite team to placing them right into the action with immersive tech, digital content transforms spectatorship from a passive experience to an active one, letting everyone revel in a good sporting victory.