Stagwell augmented reality company ARound has signed its first partnership with Major League Soccer as the growth of artificial intelligence and sport fuels opportunities across matches and live events.
ARound began expanding its stadium platform in partnership with Target on August 24 to include Minnesota United FC at Allianz Field. The release allows fans to interact with digital content, adding an extra element of entertainment and engagement during games. This marks ARound’s continuation of adding partners across various sports and leagues, having previously released AR apps with Major League Baseball’s Minnesota Twins and Kansas City Royals, the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers and the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams.
ARound founder and CEO Josh Beattie explained that following previous collaborations, ARound is focused on increasing the accessibility of the platform across the web and broadcast, transforming fans from “spectators to participants” in the game.
“I knew I was going to be part of the MLB. [and] The NFL needed to move from standalone apps to easily embeddable apps and then to web apps.[-based]”Everything we’re doing with augmented reality can now be brought not just to mobile, but actually to the broadcast cameras, and now we can have the augmented content on the actual cameras and in the stadium,” Beatty said.
This also comes as the rise of AI and sports marketing converge, rekindling interest in augmented and virtual reality content that was pushed to the shadows of cutting-edge tech when generative AI burst onto the marketing world. For example, AI could enable AR and VR platforms to quickly identify key moments, like game highlights, to create the most engaging content. The latter isn’t possible with ARound yet, but will be as the platform develops, Beatty said.
The AR experience will run throughout the football season into the fall, allowing fans to interact with it throughout the game and will include a variety of game-synced effects, games that allow users to shoot targets to earn points, and contests to win Target gift cards. This is the first time ARound has integrated stadium AR technology into an MLS pre-game celebration, and the company hopes to capture fan attention and expand into live events, sports and educational opportunities in the future.
Match Day Engagement
As AI evolves, experts are finding ways it can really enhance personalization and measurement in AR and VR. After all, AI relies on the use of large datasets.
ARound reports that current user engagement averages more than 15 minutes per game, which Beatty explained is crucial given that much of the mobile and social content interaction is currently very “fleeting.” The AR experience allows fans to become a part of and connect with the game, rather than just passively consuming content, he explained. Beatty did not provide an estimate for ARound’s user base.
“Especially on a smartphone, once you swipe something away, it’s gone forever,” Beatty told Digiday. “What we’re showing is, number one, there’s persistence where it exists, and as people interact with our content, it’s much more memorable and meaningful than something that exists anywhere else.”
Evan Entler, vice president of digital media for MLS team Minnesota United, said it’s one of many new ways the franchise is “pushing boundaries and enriching the fan experience through technology.” The Loons Liftoff game in the app, for example, blends technology, storytelling and community experiences to “enhance the game-day experience, not hinder it,” Entler added.
Where AI comes into play
Currently, ARound is using AI to help tag match highlights and other potentially engaging content, crunching data from sports application programming interface (API) integrations, and leveraging Stagwell Marketing Cloud, the company’s software suite for marketers, to combine other immersive technologies to create content at venues (ARound won Stagwell’s annual Shark Tank-like innovation competition).
The platform ingests real-time sports API data, including game, fan, and audience statistics. When AI flags key moments, such as a home run during a baseball game, it serves up the right content and brand experience to match that moment. The goal is to use AI to create personalized experiences that feel connected to and focus on each individual fan. ARound is preparing to further leverage generative AI to produce a larger volume of content.
“The idea is to deliver the right experience at the right time, but we have the perfect platform for generative to take hold,” Beatty says. “We’re just not there yet.”
Other agencies are similarly working on multi-dimensional or experiential content, with brands exploring this possibility in tandem with AI developments: This month, the United States Tennis Association partnered with the IBM Watsonx platform to use generative AI to create real-time match reports and long-form articles from the USTA editorial team, and introduced a new feature that incorporates AI audio commentary at this year’s U.S. Open tournament.
Integrated digital agency Mekanism has been exploring Snapchat and Meta tools to create immersive, interactive content for clients including Charles Schwab and Alaska Airlines, and the firm previously developed an Instagram lens for Keystone Light that uses AR to immerse people in the brand’s world.
Jeff MacDonald, director of Mekanism’s AI lab, said one of the most challenging and costly aspects of AR and VR is creating assets and customizing these experiences for end users, but AI can improve this.
“This is where AI really shines,” says MacDonald. “We can now generate assets faster and customize the experience more effectively, which not only makes production more efficient, but also makes it more personalized and impactful for the user.”
Matt Quinn, managing director at multidimensional experience company Journey, cautioned that neither AR nor AI “will be game-changing on their own,” because they both have limitations. AR requires people to use hardware “between you and the outside world,” while VR and AR are bandwidth-intensive, he explained. Instead, the future may be about blending these experiences together using a little bit of each technology.
“Instead, brands should use everything from physical design, AR, VR and, increasingly, AI to create multi-dimensional, multi-sensory experiences that blend the physical, immersive and virtual worlds,” Quinn said.