This online promotional film focused on how IBM is using its SmartCloud platform to improve Wimbledon’s website design is part of the brand’s wider marketing push to showcase its All England Lawn Tennis Club suite of business computing solutions to the business world.
Long term Wimbledon sponsor IBM is leveraging its 2012 Wimbledon work via a new business-to-business marketing campaign. The IT giant’s objective is to raise business brand awareness by highlighting it’s All England Club services. These services are led by its radically redesigned website which includes the new Live@Wimbledon broadcast service and IBM’s interactive analytics-enabled SlamTracker.
The aim is to enable potential customers to engage with the very IBM technology they may purchase and see exactly how it works.
The traditional arm of the B2B campaign is running across print and outdoor media and the marketing approach is to showcase its Wimbledon technology partnership and promote how it can be applied to other business settings.
While the digital elements, in addition to the above online video, also include social media activity integrated with the Guardian’s coverage of the tennis tournament on Facebook and Twitter. IBM has formed a media partnership with The Guardian which also includes an advertisement feature on the newspaper’s website.
The webfilm was seeded online and coincided with the launch of The All England Club’s new Wimbledon Championships website.
The website aims to reflect the competition’s heritage and global appeal and is expected to see 16 million unique visitors and more than half a billion hits during the tournament.
IBM is the tech partner behind the redesigned site which aims to provide a more creative and immersive experience through an intuitive navigation services, powerful imagery, a set of utility functions and enhanced content (including a new live TV and radio broadcast service Live@Wimbledon and the interactive analytics-enabled IBM SlamTracker scoreboard.
Live@Wimbledon blends live action from around the tournament by dropping into matches at crucial points in play with the ‘off-court colour of a day at The Championships’. Presented by former players Mats Wilander and Annabel Croft, this first year of the service will see Live@Wimbledon Video available only in the UK and the Americas (excluding Brazil). The Live @ Wimbledon service replaces its predecessor Radio Wimbledon.
The SlamTracker uses real-time analytics technology to create an interactive scorecard which will be available online and via mobile as well as to Guardian readers visiting the Wimbledon pages on the newspaper’s website as well. The idea is to provide fans with deeper insight into matches by blending historical and real time data.
New technology features include ‘Momentum’ capability maps a match in real-time (which visualise key turning points and their causes, such as winners, aces and so on) and the ‘Keys to the Match’ feature leverages historical and immediate data to determine the top three things a player must do in order to do well in a specific match.
One further piece of IBM technology being trialled at Wimbledon 2012, following a 2011 pilot on Court 18, is IBM SecondSight which tracks player movement.
Global reach and personalisation are two of the major new objectives of the new IBM/Wimbledon services.
‘The predictive analytics technology and the exciting match information available online and on mobile achieves the additional global penetration for Wimbledon that the organisers want and it gets more young people interested in the sport,’ explains IBM’s Wimbledon client and programme executive Alan Flack.
“Together with IBM, we’ve created a new website which features increased options for people to personalise their Wimbledon experience,” says All England Club commercial director Mick Desmond. ‘Visitors can follow the progress of their favourite players, view live match play clips of the day’s action, and access scores and results delivered in real-time. We expect this increasingly engaging and personalised online experience to appeal to fans in ever-greater numbers.’
Comment:
These new technology tools for 2012 follow an impressive recent contribution to the Wimbledon experience from IBM – including its IBM Seer mobile app. See previous case study.
These systems provide new data that helps players, coaches, commentators and fans alike; and, add a new dimension to the fans’ understanding of the science of tennis.
This new hi-tech data-led approach seems to be pulling tennis in the direction of baseball – perhaps the sport which most utilises statistical analytics both as a tactical tool and as part off the spectator/fan experience.
According to IBM, the uses for businesses are almost infinite.
‘Businesses across multiple industries and geographies can gain insights from large volumes of data and then use that knowledge to choose the best strategies and better predict outcomes,’ the company said.
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