Fans Just Want To Be Inspired

In one of my favourite scenes from the movie Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise’s character is facing off with his client, NFL superstar Rod Tidwell after a particularly messy game. Jerry is appealing to Rod’s better nature asking him to “inspire” the crowd, but Rod played by Cuba Gooding Jr. is having none of it. “I am athlete. I am not an entertainer”, he says. Jerry’s response is that there is only one thing crowds, fans, team owners and sponsors really want. “They just want to be inspired”.

Working at Wimbledon this week has been a joy mostly because you are constantly surrounded by people who want to be inspired, and tennis players like Johanna Konta who are inspiring crowds by beating the odds. It is this intersection between entertainment, performance and inspiration which has been compelling to watch during this years Championships.

Brits will always root for Andy Murray not just because he’s British but because he’s the world number 1. Even fair weather tennis fans and British newspapers that don’t give many column inches to tennis for the rest of the year, become hardcore fans for two weeks in July each year. But the more British thing to do is not to follow the winner, but to root for the underdog. As a nation, we love to support the player who is fighting against the odds for a place in history. That’s what inspires us.

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ brilliant book about sports analytics he explains why the majority of fair weather fans love to root for the underdog,

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”

Having a front row seat to watch the analysis of those levels of excitement at Wimbledon this year has been fascinating, but I was most curious to see how that excitements translates in inspiration for those following the game and being caught up in the stories behind each player. It’s something that IBM has been tracking as part of our partnership with Wimbledon, using using ‘cognitive command centres’ which are powered by IBM Watson in order to understand the emotions behind the players and the crowd. Unlike traditional command centres which marketers have been using for years to measure social media mentions or fan engagement across different channels, cognitive command centres measure the emotions, not just the engagement. And the fact that these command centres are ‘cognitive’ mean that they understand human emotions and make hypothesis around what those emotions translate into, learning along the way as the algorithm is refined by the IBMers working behind the scenes.

The way that IBM is able to understand the levels of emotion and inspiration at Wimbledon during the Championship is to measure "excitement levels". Think of it like a Moneyball number, basically a way of aggregating huge amounts of data and simplifying it all down into one number that Wimbledon’s content marketers, media analysts and broadcasters are able to quickly understand. It is the key to not just understanding the levels of emotions playing out during each match, but it is being used to help curate all the video highlights for every game. We are also measuring ambient, player and crowd noise to see how that contributes the the excitement levels, when compared with match data and competitive analysis.

Measuring these emotions and excitement levels has meant that for the first time in 2017, the AI technology behind IBM Watson has contributed to 100% of the curation and creation of the show court video highlights for Wimbledon.com and within the Wimbledon app. It’s seriously impressive stuff.

People just want to be inspired.

There are many reasons why this type of cognitive computing and emotional analysis is so important, not just for Wimbledon, but for brand marketers everywhere. Many brands have hardcore fans, cheerleaders and advocates who will always support them and buy their stuff no matter what. But the vast majority of customers will be experiential customers who have engaged with that brand for any number of random reasons (through advertising, word-of-mouth-recommendations, timing, clever content marketing etc..). The brand was in the right place at the right time on the right channel, and that customer chose that brand at that particular moment (of truth). 

Tennis is the same. In the same way that people make purchasing decisions with their hearts and justify those decisions with their heads, Wimbledon fosters many new or incidental tennis fans who are unlikely to follow tennis for the rest of the year. Wimbledon, with its Pimms, champagne and strawberries, is the archetypal British experience, but when excitement levels drop or local heroes crash out, like Andy Murray did yesterday, then some of the public quickly lose interest. By my back-of-the-napkin quick calculations, social media mentions dropped by over 20% after Nadal, Djokovic and Murray crashed out of Wimbledon. The key to getting people’s attention (and keeping it), is not to speak to their heads with news articles, analysis and links, it is to speak to their hearts.

People just want to be inspired!

In that Jerry Maguire clip, Jerry tells Rod that he plays football with his head, but in order to inspire the crowd, and get that lucrative contract that he is so desperate for, he needs to play with his heart. Brands should be no different. They need to stop focusing so much on measuring engagement metrics, and instead find ways to measure emotions and excitement levels around their brand. Engagement just tells you want people clicked on. Sentiment may show you whether it was a “positive” click or a “negative” click, but emotional analytics show more importantly what mood that person was in.

It is this technology that IBM has also been using to measure player performance and personality traits, by monitoring player interviews and over 6,000 Wimbledon news articles in The Telegraph in order to look at the personality traits of the most successful players. The insights have revealed some fascinating results and you can read the full article here.

So what does all this mean?

It means that there are now new way of measuring fan behaviour and more creative ways of creating content that resonates emotionally with audiences. It means that pioneering AI technology has reached a point where it can augment human intelligence to the point that it is making brand marketers much better at creating content, and much more efficient at building faster relationships with its fair weather customers, not just it’s most passionate advocates. IBM has proven that Wimbledon can provide compelling content to all 70 million of its fans during the two weeks of the Championship, but if I was a travel company, retailer who gets the majority of its fans at Christmas or a telco that has a window of a few weeks to retain existing customers, I would be jumping all of this technology to see how it can help my brand capitalize on emotions and excitement levels.

It will be interesting to watch the excitement levels over the course of this afternoon as Johanna Konta takes to the court, as the underdog, to hopefully beat Venus Williams on her way to a historic women’s finals appearance. It will be exciting to watch. And I will be counting on Watson to show me exactly how exciting…

I'll be discussing all these technologies in a webinar on 27th July. Click here to register!

LINKS

• "That" Jerry Maguire clip
• More info (and free demos) of the IBM technology used at Wimbledon
• Watson analysing how Champions perform under pressure
• Personality insight analysis of Andy Murray
• Can AI predict what makes a great tennis player?
• What are the personality traits of a potential world Champion?
• How Wimbledon is using AI to improve the fan experience

I'd love to continue the conversation on twitter using the hashtag #WhatMakesGreat or let me know your views in the comments.