The NFL's AI Innovation Hub is a testing ground for new marketing strategies
The NFL’s AI innovation hub is helping the league experiment with marketing strategies using cutting-edge technology. By applying AI and generative tools, the NFL can now deliver personalized content tailored to global audiences. For instance, ads featuring Travis Kelce for Germany and Patrick Mahomes for the UK can be swapped in real time, enhancing engagement. Additionally, AI-powered translation tools are being tested to reach fans in diverse markets, from Latin America to China.
Beyond marketing, the NFL is considering vendors like Amazon and Microsoft to scale these solutions across platforms, including social media and in-game experiences.
As the NFL pursues a long-term strategy to grow its fan base, the league is relying more heavily on an internal think tank to power its most technologically advanced marketing experiments.
The innovation team, composed of marketers, executives, data analysts and others, has become hyper-focused on using AI to replicate and scale content for global audiences by tailoring messaging to their preferences.
For example, if the NFL determined that German audiences loved Travis Kelce, then it could serve them a Travis Kelce-themed ad. But if the league found that London-based audiences preferred Patrick Mahomes, it would need a way to swap out the ad’s content in real time, including the images and text, said Chi Ogbuehi, the NFL’s VP of marketing technology and consumer products. The process needs to be replicated for other cultures tuning into the league, from Brazil to Tokyo.
“One of the quickest ways to do that is through AI and generative AI,” Ogbuehi said.
The hub is in its second year of operation, and is still in testing. Eventually, the league could use the hub to apply emerging technologies, including AI, to strengthen engagement and provide precise ways of targeting the NFL’s core products to fans, including promoting NFL+ and tickets to games, an NFL executive recently told Ad Age.
The early stages of these innovation efforts coincide with other activations from the league, outside the hub, which are already reaching fans. This week, Amazon unveiled in-broadcast, AI-powered features developed with the NFL that will be viewable during Amazon Prime’s broadcast of “Thursday Night Football,” which begins tonight. Separately, the league announced an integration of its intellectual property into a popular Roblox game. Also, last week it integrated social community features on the websites of its 32 teams, in partnership with engagement platform Arena.
The NFL’s tech experiments go beyond textbook generative AI products like simple text-to-image tools. Language translation, for example, is key to the league’s engagement with diverse audiences. Through the hub, the NFL is testing solutions that can quickly exchange the language of content in media, even in markets that the league has not yet formally entered, Ogbuehi said. These include languages common in Latin America, right-to-left languages such as Arabic, and non-Romance languages such as Chinese. The translation tech can even mimic different tones of voice.
Full story at AdAge.
