At the heart of IBM’s partnership with the Rugby Football Union (RFU) is its ‘TryTracker’ tool – a predictive analytics tool that visually represents real-time player influence, keys game tactics and head-to-heads and match momentum.
The IBM TryTracker provides play-by-play insights during a game and is hosted on the RFU’s official website.
The alliance aims to improve England rugby fan experience by using IBM’s data expertise to explore, identify and visualise real-time, in-game insights an exciting, intuitive and accessible way.
IBMs role as official analytics partner spans all England games, including those in the RBS 6 Nations (where Accenture has a similar technology partnership role with the tournament’s property owner).
The objective is to drives interest in live rugby by boosting the fan experience both at home and in-stadium.
The idea is to enrich the experience of existing fans and to introduce new fans to the sport through engaging, real-time insights.
The TryTracker is also the engine behind the IBM/RFU ‘Rugby Insight’ online video series which uses the data analsys as a platform for match discussion and conversation.
This includes teaser spots,
as well as game-specific, longer form online programming such as these pre- and post-match videos about the Italy v England match.
Also for the 2015 RBS 6 Nations Championships, IBM is one of two brands (the other being Avis) to agree a media partnership with the Telegraph Media Group (TMG).
In addition to partnering on the newspaper’s tournament launch 16-page preview supplement, IBM is working in tandem with the paper on tournament-related coverage across all platforms (from the paper itself, to email newsletters, website, mobile, tablet and social channels.
At the core of the alliance is IBM’s Try Tracker sitting on The Telegraph’s own rugby channel – available on desktop and mobile.
Comment
It was back in February 2013 that the RFU and IBM signed a five-year sponsorship and supply deal built around the technology giant providing statistical analysis for rugby England Rugby fans.
The deal also saw IBM provide a transformational plan for the RFU’s CRM system.
A similar approach to its sponsorship and technology supply deal to three of the four grand slam tennis tournaments – Wimbledon, the Australian Open and the US Open – which include IBM’s ‘SlamTracker’ tool.
For the RFU IBM primarily uses its predictive analytics software to analyse historic and current rugby data (provided by Opta) which it converts into an in-game statistics.
IBM and the RFU claim that this far the partnership has contributed to a 27% rise in unique website visitors to RFU.com during the RBS 6 Nations Championship.
Founded back in 1871 and headquartered in Twickenham, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) is the governing body of the English rugby union (and the oldest rugby governing body in the world).
Its umbrella strategic objective to invest in English rugby clubs, the England national rugby union team and rugby in schools.
The property owner employees more than 500 staff and generates an annual turnover of around £116 million.
Links
England Rugby TryTracker:
http://www.englandrugby.com/trytracker/fixtures/943/2015/20150214/776852/#/momentum
IBM Sports:
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/sports/
IBM UK YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/IBMSmarterPlanetUK
Telegraph IBM TryTracker:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/sport/rugby-trytracker/
