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Creating new revenue streams, identifying untapped audiences and better engaging fans onsite and all year-round are just some of the wins iconic Australian sporting events are chalking up thanks to human-centric digital innovation.

If there’s any lesson brands should have taken from the last three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that investing in digital can deliver even more engagement – online and in-person. And with increasingly immersive technologies such as virtual reality, data-driven insight using artificial intelligence and creative video delivery coming to the fore, opportunities to unite digital with human-centred design principles to win in both physical and digital realms are growing.

The power of human-centric digital experiences is particularly apparent in the work Infosys has been doing to ensure leading sporting brands create unparalleled customer experiences. Here, we explore two stellar examples in the Australian Grand Prix and Australian Open.

Serving up digital innovations for the Australian Open

Using digital, immersive technologies and data to ensure fan engagement is even more immersive is also a long-term imperative for Infosys and Tennis Australia around the Australian Open. And this year’s event proved an unparalleled showcase of how physical and digital are coming together in innovative ways.

Among the highlights of the 2023 Australian Open were a revamped Match Centre 2.0, available on the AO website as well as mobile app for all matches throughout the tournament and providing fans with immersive insights such as Matchbeats, Stroke Summary, Rally Analysis, Courtvision and AI Commentary. A ‘win predictor’ also gave fans real-time predictions as each match progressed. Accessibility was equally in the spotlight, while an enhanced Infosys MatchBeats presented simplified game data and visualisations thanks to contrasting colour combinations that met Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA.

A host of AI Video Insights further powered on-court strategy and media reporting while giving fans, players and coaches unprecedented insights into every game.

In addition, an enhanced Player’s Portal with AI-generated videos democratised the level of insight available to players and coaches around game and competitor insights for post-match reviews and pre-game analysis. For example, Get into the Zone served up video montages of a player’s former winning performances, while an opponent tendency feature allowed players to view and analyse the statistical playing tendencies of their opponents.

And AI Shot of the Day also boasted of enhancements, enabling Tennis Australia’s media team to quickly analyse and post social media ready clips from the best shots of each day.

“For us, this has been a monumental and strong partnership with the Australian Open since 2019. Post each edition, our team takes a step back through an empathy led approach and assess data from all stakeholders engaging with the AO. This follows design thinking workshops to reimagine how our digital innovations can further enhance the stakeholder experience with the Happy Slam, make it more accessible, immersive and engaging. Our strength is digital whether it is AI, digital learning platforms or mixed reality and we combine it with a passion for tennis.

We’ve seen over 50 million fans engage with the digital innovations built by Infosys over the years with MatchBeats alone seeing 7.2mn views this edition, witnessed over 100 million views of footage generated by our AI driven innovations, launched physical platforms such as the virtual hub to engage 10,000+ key consumers of AO during the pandemic and are now going beyond with Infosys Springboard to nurture future leaders and Engage to leverage digital for sustainable futures. Over 11,000 fans engaged with our VR experiences which has doubled from 2022, highlighting a strong appetite for digital experiences. And being conscious of the future, our entire footprint this year onwards at AO 2023 was and will continue to be carbon neutral”, says Navin Rammohan, Vice President, Segment Head Marketing, Sponsorships and Events at Infosys.

Onsite, Infosys itself harnessed virtual reality in its fan zone activation. This allowed attendees to experience tennis in several creatively themed metaverse worlds, from a ride into hyperspace with moon tennis and battling thousands of flying tennis balls in a spaceship, to sparring with AO superstars avatars on centre court.

“Working with Infosys over the past five years has enabled us to set new benchmarks in fan engagement using digital technologies,” says Tennis Australia CEO and Australian Open Tournament Director, Craig Tiley. “This partnership has enabled us to deliver new innovative digital experiences year after year for everyone associated with the tournament. We remain committed to making the Australian Open a global standard for a digitally-enabled sport that is inspiring, engaging, inclusive and sustainable.”

Focusing on the fans of the Australian Grand Prix

Australian Grand Prix Corporation (AGPC) General Manager of Marketing and Experience, Arthur Gillion, will never forget 13 March 2020. Just two days out from the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix sporting event in Victoria’s Albert Park Circuit, and hours before practice sessions were to begin, the event was cancelled due to Covid-19.  

“The world was watching. It was a hard moment to go through,” Gillion recalled during the recent Infosys Confluence event. “From a strategic perspective, what we had planned for the following years had to change. The way we approached brand management, from diagnosis, to strategy to tactics all flipped on its head.”

Yet even as the pandemic negatively impacted the physical race, it presented an opportunity for the AGPC to overhaul digital experience to create a more fan-fuelled approach.

“We couldn’t stop communicating or trying to provide some joy to the fans,” Gillion said. “The emphasis had to be on the digital experience. We were very innovative in that space to stay connected.”

Helping AGPC was strategic technology partner, WONGDOODY, the global human experience company of Infosys. Together, the pair reassessed AGPC’s digital ecosystem as a first step. Diving into data the organisation held about its fans to build insights that could be realised in added value and simplified, improved touchpoints was the overarching driving force.

“While AGPC had a lot of data, the team didn’t necessarily know what it was telling them,” WONGDOODY’s chief experience and design officer APAC, James Noble, explains. “The key was to work out what information was relevant, versus irrelevant, then use that to understand the different audiences and what each of those fans wants.

“Being able to convert that into a digital experience would make it easier for audiences to understand the Australian Grand Prix, lead them towards stronger engagement and in time, to purchase things like tickets.”

Focus shifted to digital content as the dominant mechanism for keeping fans connected, and to an annual timeline of engagement, rather than burst of activity surrounding the events. Owned platform articles, blog posts and a podcast series developed by AGPC took centre stage, with built-in capabilities making it easy for audiences to engage with and share content.

With the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix website the first point of touch from a brand perspective, giving fans what they want online is critical to any human-centric approach, Noble says. WONGDOODY helped AGPC understand its digital touchpoints, understood which customer segments AGPC were trying to attract, inform, educate and engage, and transformed this into a solution. The Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix caters to diverse customer cohorts, from motor and F1 enthusiasts, to those who come for the spectacle, ‘culture vultures’ wanting to be seen; families on a day out; and corporate and sponsor delegates.

“It’s working out not only the user experience but the content strategy and experience and how that leads you through the funnel, as opposed to having people floating around with no direction,” Noble continues. “Do you want them to press that button? Or talk to that person? What is it you want to happen next?”

As AGPC began work to bring its physical event back, digital experience took on another vital role. A major achievement was improving the ticketing pathway online for the returning five-day event.

“There are lots of different permutations of tickets and it had been difficult for a consumer to understand what they’re buying,” Noble says. “We looked at the matrix of all the ticketing permutations and experiences you could have, put in a simpler interface and easier-to-use experience, and skipped all the doing it again to go straight to purchase. Just by that happening and knowing what ticket types were selling out, the AGPC team could make informed business decisions and understand where to adapt and create more of what’s popular.”

The work done as an organisation to lift digital innovation has without doubt delivered AGPC incredible growth. In 2022, almost 420,000 people came to the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, up from 324,100 in 2019, adding more than $170 million to the visitor economy. AGPC also saw a 154 per cent increase in digital traffic during event week and a 218 per cent increase in traffic in the months leading up to the event. It exceeded 2.6 million unique visitors to the site in 2022, a 200 per cent increase on 2019.

Importantly, the first release of Grandstand tickets for the 2023 event sold out in under 3.5 hours, testament to the seamless purchasing process. This ticketing architecture overhaul has since triggered changes to the physical environment and decision-making driving further revenue growth.

For example, pre-pandemic, the F1 event had four private lounges. In 2022, there were eight, and this year’s Formula 1 Rolex Australian Grand Prix has 14. Being in the fortunate position of having much demand and selling tickets faster enables AGPC to shift focus quickly, and use insights to innovate physical experiences.

“Because the team knows so far ahead about what kinds of tickets are being sold, there’s an opportunity to create another stand or another section. The forward planning is so much easier and it’s adding millions to sales generated,” Noble adds.

Infosys

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Sports fans today have more ways than ever to watch their favorite teams beyond the traditional, live stadium experience, including television, streaming services, even highlights on social media.  

For years, fans have been less inclined to choose the live stadium experience, with game attendance across major North American professional sports in decline. In 2020, financial news and opinion company 24/7 Wall Street reviewed 10-year changes in average home game attendance for professional hockey, baseball, basketball, and football teams across North America and found average attendance had declined by more than 10% over the past decade. 

An oft-cited reason for this decline is increasing competition from home-viewing options. A 2018 report by consulting firm Deloitte notes that fans at home often have access to better camera angles, as well as AR/VR, multiplatform, and other multimedia options. In response, sports teams and venue operators are working hard to improve and differentiate the in-stadium experience. A big part of that effort involves advanced analytics to gain better insight into what’s happening at a venue in real-time so staff can respond rapidly to changing conditions.

In today’s sporting venues, analytics is being put to work to help sports organizations and venue operators better understand where fans are parking and queuing to optimally station staff to take tickets and direct fans to their seats, restock concessions before they run out of items, even increase security staff in certain areas before a situation gets out of hand. 

Here are three examples of how sports organizations are using analytics to gain better insights into their venues. 

Metrics help NHL support sustainability goals 

The National Hockey League (NHL) is leveraging data and analytics to measure the carbon footprint of its teams’ venues and to glean insights into best practices for its sustainability goals, notable given the league’s venues’ dependence on energy to maintain their ice. The NHL has worked with partner SAP to create NHL Venue Metrics, a sustainability platform that teams and their venue partners can use for data collection, validation, and reporting and insights. 

“The most important thing about any sustainability platform is you cannot impact what you cannot measure,” says Omar Mitchell, vice president of sustainable infrastructure and growth initiatives at the NHL. “That’s consistent across whatever your functional role, whatever your industry focuses on. The only way you can really advance change is by measuring, and then from measurement, impact. Sustainability is all about continuous business improvement. Sustainability is all about innovation and business optimization. The only way for you to speak in the language of business is to have the data that help you derive those insights.” 

NHL Venue Metrics is an end-to-end, cloud-based platform to help venues measure and analyze the carbon footprint they generate across areas such as energy, water, waste, and recycling. The operational data is processed using SAP HANA Cloud and visualized with SAP Analytics Cloud. SAP is the technical lead, while Mitchell’s team works closely with the NHL’s club business and analytics group for data capture and the processing of ticketing and premium concessions, for example. Mitchell’s team also works closely with the IT group to ensure the platform and its data are secure. 

Mitchell’s advice: Showcase the business benefits of sustainability initiatives in addition to their environmental benefits. More than two-thirds of NHL arenas have converted to LED game lights rather than the old 1,000-watt metal halide lights. While the LED lights have led to substantial energy savings in those facilities, they also make the ice sheet look brighter, making the surface pop. 

“We’re not telling the venues, ‘You must change your lights,’” Mitchell says. “We’re showing them all of the examples and best cases for why this innovation is so important and successful, as well as the benefits from an environmental standpoint.” 

Texas Rangers’ state-of-the-art stadium built on data 

A new stadium, and the data it produces, have spurred Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers to reimagine its business operations. The team’s new Globe Life Field, which opened in 2020, was an opportunity to develop a robust and scalable data and analytics environment that could produce data in categories that didn’t even exist in 1992 when the team’s previous stadium opened. 

“In the old stadium, we just didn’t have the ability to get the data that we needed,” says Machelle Noel, director of business intelligence at the Texas Rangers Baseball Club. 

“At the old stadium, you’d pull up at the park and you’d give somebody your $20 to park and they would put that $20 in their fanny pack,” adds Brian Vinson, client success leader and principal consultant at Resultant, which worked closely with the Rangers on the new data and analytics environment. “Then you’d get to the gate and show them your paper ticket. They would let you in and then you would go to your seat, then maybe you’d go buy some concessions. You’d scan your credit card to get your concessions or your hat, or pay cash, and the team wouldn’t see that report until the next day or the next week.” 

It took hours of work for business operations to pull data and prepare reports after a game ended. The team’s new environment automates that task, generating a report within an hour of a game’s completion. It also provides near real-time updates that can be shared with executives during a game. This allows the operations team to determine which stadium entrances are the busiest at any given time to enable them to better distribute staff, promotion items, and concession resources. Departments can see what the top-selling shirts (and sizes) are at any given time, how many paper towels are left in any given restroom, even how many hot dogs are sold per minute. 

Noel and Vinson’s advice: Share your successes and educate stakeholders about the art of the possible. It’s not enough to just build capabilities, you need to help executives see how those capabilities will benefit them.  

“The idea that ‘if you build it, they will come,’ does not always work, because you can build stuff and people don’t know about it” Vinson says.  

NTT IndyCar turns the Brickyard into a smart city with analytics 

NTT IndyCar is leveraging analytics, AI, and digital twin in every element of its business, from managing its venues like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), known to fans as the Brickyard, to providing fans with real-time insights into the decisions made by teams midrace. 

NTT IndyCar has deployed NTT’s Smart Venue solution at IMS. The app takes its cues from efforts made to create smart cities, treating the venue, which draws upwards of 350,000 fans on race day, as a mini city. 

“We’re thinking about it more like the idea of mobilizing and planning to operate a city for a day, everything from moving people around to serving them through emergency services and being able to see around corners where we might want to dispatch someone even before an incident has occurred,” says SJ Luedtke, vice president of marketing at IndyCar. 

Smart Venue’s AI provides full visibility of the venue, with data calibrated every 30 seconds at greater than 90% accuracy. AI-enabled optical detection technologies, combined with real-time entry gate flow rate data, allow the organization to monitor crowds and traffic and generate insights about congestion at specific gates and tunnels using predictive analytics. 

“On a given race day, it is the second-largest city in Indiana,” says Bennett Indart, vice president of SMART World Solutions at NTT. “You can imagine 350,000 people trying to get into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. For the past several years, we’ve been helping the operations team understand where the bottlenecks are. This year, we’ve actually added a function to provide that to the fans themselves on their mobile device.” 

Luedtke’s advice: Develop close relationships with your stakeholders. She notes that she and CIO Rebecca Ruselink work hand-in-hand. She says their partnership is strong because IT really tries to understand her team’s pain points and to answer their needs rather than just supplying the solution IT thinks would be best.  

“Our teams meet regularly,” Luedtke says. “We have a roadmap of things that we want to accomplish.” 

Data Management, Predictive Analytics

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The Tour de France is many things. It’s the world’s largest cycling event, attracting 150 million TV viewers in Europe alone and 10 million fans across social media platforms. It’s also a huge logistical challenge, requiring a complex network of road closures as well as ensuring millions of spectators enjoy the race safely.

Amaury Sport Organisation (A.S.O.), the organizers of the Tour de France, also need to ensure they can tell the story of the race to a vast audience of fans, something that hasn’t been easy over the years. Race officials stationed in remote areas have long had to contend with poor connectivity, and an ever-growing legion of viewers has stretched external-facing applications to their limits. 

NTT, which has been the official technology partner of the Tour de France for the past eight years, has used its Edge as a Service offerings to help the Tour de France retain its status as the world’s premier cycling event. By embracing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins, A.S.O. have expanded the reach of the race to a new generation of fans and ensured they’re able to continually optimize race operations. 

“We started working on Tour de France in 2015 and, when we began, the digital capability of the event was very limited,” says Peter Gray, Senior Vice President, Advanced Technology Group (Sport) at NTT. “Lots of information was captured manually and communicated over race radio. There was limited information available on television and very limited available information available on digital.

“Today, you a see a television broadcast that’s full of live, rich data about rider speeds and time gaps, and you’ve got second screen apps like Race Center that allow you to follow every moment of the race.”

For example, by leveraging a digital fabric consisting of IoT sensors and real-time analytics, NTT created a digital twin of the Tour de France last year, turning the roads of France into the world’s largest connected stadium. This provides race organizers with an unprecedented view of the race, allowing them to deliver new and enhanced digital experiences to engage fans around the world.

NTT has also created a digital human, an interactive kiosk featuring a realistic AI-generated human avatar which functions as a digital Tour de France guide. The avatar was located at the Grand Depart in Copenhagen and in NTT’s Tech Truck, which follows the entire tour.

“It’s hooked into all of the knowledge that we have about the race and can talk with you authoritatively about what’s going on,” says Gray. 

NTT has partnered with other sports organizers to transform the digital experience of sporting events such as the Absa Cape Epic, the Open Championship and the iconic NTT INDYCAR SERIES, where digital twin and predictive analytics technologies help to put fans behind the wheel of race cars. 

However, beyond the sporting arena, there are lessons to be learned for all organizations looking to embrace technologies such as edge computing to digitally transform their businesses.  

“What we’re doing with the Tour de France is a microcosm of the digital transformation that many businesses are going through. When I described the race being highly manual in 2015, that’s analogous to a business that’s running on manual operating processes, and continuing to use lots of paper, and having disconnected processes.

“Organizations are looking to use things like IoT to capture and measure different parts of their business. They’re looking to use things like digital twins to give them holistic visibility across an entire landscape. 

“That landscape might be a race traveling across France, or that might be a factory or retail site.”

Learn more about the revolutionary fan experience in the world’s largest connected stadium.

Edge Computing