SVG Sit-Down: Eon Media’s Ashish Agrawal Talks AI Sponsorship-ROI Reporting, Archiving

Two AI-based solutions provide metrics for sports sponsors’ decisions

Eon Media’s Ashish Agrawal: “You’ve got 20 different brands on the field: there’s the sidelines, the jersey, the gear, the commercials, even the announcers. There are so many different places where sponsors are made visible, and you want ROI data on all these places.”

You can’t throw a stone without hitting something regarding artificial intelligence. For sports, that’s a good thing. Companies are stepping up to the plate (pun intended) and finding out how AI can make life easier — sometimes in ways they’ve never thought of. Eon Media’s eonEXTRACT solution, for example, uses AI to determine return on investment in real time. Eon Media founder and CEO Ashish Agrawal sat down with SVG to discuss the importance of AI in sponsorship-ROI reporting and archiving — two very different things, except that the information provided for both can have a definite impact on sports production and the bottom line.

What’s the connection between AI and sports sponsorship?
Sports is driven by sponsorship — local, regional, national, and international. We look at sponsorship as a viewer, sponsor, or broadcaster. It comes with a significant amount of investment, but what has a sponsor achieved for their investment? What’s their ROI?

How does AI play a role with sponsorship-ROI reporting?
AI has been around for years, but there was no granularity and comprehensiveness, and it wasn’t used for this purpose. That’s what eonEXTRACT does.

What’s the difference in sponsorship-ROI reporting in the pre-AI days versus today?
Before AI, data was limited to TV-measurement viewership and social-media engagement. Sponsors would be relying on their marketing agency to gather the information, including fans in stadium and broadcast. Whatever data was reported and its conclusions were taken at face value.

Ratings data has never been for OTT, [for which] true viewership info is available only to the streaming company. Ad-supported services have changed that, but the data is limited to what the streaming service or intermediaries are providing. You’re relying on what’s provided and making assumptions based on past experiences, not on what may be true for the moment.

eonEXTRACT dashboard shows tracking of Xfinity sponsorship and an overview of data collected for sponsorship ROI.

Today, with AI and eonEXTRACT, we can provide sponsorship-ROI reporting to any kind of sponsor — the brand, league, broadcaster, any organization — with four types of data that look at the broadcast channel on OTT and in person. OTT is growing and representational of over-the-air, satellite, and cable.

Those data types are:

• Data from social-media engagement that targets the sponsor, venue, broadcaster, or match
• Viewership data — how much is happening on the service itself
• What type of actual interactions people are having during the specific commercial or seeing the sponsorship
• The interaction — Bigger events should have more interaction.

eonEXTRACT has an extreme understanding of what is really happening during the event and commercial breaks on social media and in the venue. It brings together the event and the sponsor. That’s the level of insight where AI plays an important role.

Okay, so what is eonEXTRACT looking at?
This is really important. First, the actual broadcast on connected devices. Second, social media. Are fans, viewers, and other media outlets talking about the event, mentioning it? What are these conversations about and the value this brings to the sponsors?

eonEXTRACT tracks the Under Armour and Nike logos.

What’s the biggest challenge for sponsors?
The bigger the broadcast, the bigger the challenge. You’ve got 20 different brands on the field: there’s the sidelines, the jersey, the gear, the commercials, even the announcers. There are so many different places where sponsors are made visible, and you want ROI data on all these places.

Where do you place your logo based on its getting prominent exposure? Our value is that we can look at real-time brand recognition. That’s what happened during the U.S. Ski & Snowboard preliminary rounds for the 2022 Beijing Olympics: based on the sponsorship-ROI data, some camera placements were changed.

What key metrics are you looking at?
There are nine key actionable metrics eonEXTRACT looks at to get the right ROI data. Here’s an example of three of them:

• Duration: How long is the logo visible? It’s not 1-to-1. [During] an event, the logo may be covering 40%-50% of screen, so my attention drops. It’s about behavior and how people pay attention.
• Isolation: How many logos are on the same screen at the same time. Others draw away attention from yours. Your exposure is lower because you have low isolation — even if your logo is unique.
• Type: What type of event is it? Bigger events mean more people can be exposed to your logo.

With all this data, how does a sponsor determine ROI?
We don’t assume the audience size; we provide the hooks for the sponsor to plug in the numbers from the viewership. Sponsors get those numbers, and what they paid for sponsorship is very confidential; the data is never disclosed. The broadcast or league and the sponsor plug in those confidential numbers: what they paid and what ROI they expected. Then they see the actual numbers to determine if their sponsorship met their ROI expectations. They can then determine if this was a good sponsorship choice or they need to rethink logo placement.

That “plugging in” of numbers is at the backend, after an event. What do you need before the event?
We don’t need any third-party data from the sponsor or the broadcaster. The customer has zero overhead, just the event information and the distribution channels.

eonARCHIVES AI monetizes archive content for sports organizations.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time talking about sponsorship ROI and AI. Tell us about your AI archiving solution.
That’s eonARCHIVES AI. There are two goals here. The first is making available years of footage that is not readily available. This could be thousands of hours of content [both] on tape and stored digitally that needs its metadata extracted and the content made available, which has never been done. eonARCHIVES AI goes through the content and gives you content that can be repurposed — for a documentary, for example. But eonARCHIVES AI also gives you the option of placing visible and invisible watermarking in the content so you know if your content is being used with licensing or if it’s unauthorized.

Right now, we’re in discussion with a number of sports leagues on using eonARCHIVES AI for just that purpose.

Similarly, we’re working with Capitol Broadcasting Company’s WRAL in Raleigh, NC, to make their decades of news content and local programming easily accessible. In this way, [someone] creating content can find whatever clip they need. That will launch this spring, with one of the goals being to create an online video museum of North Carolina’s history, accessible to researchers and the community.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.