ESPN recently announced that they will be enhancing the personalization of their online advertising, as they officially introduced Live Connect during the networks’ Upfront presentation, for potential advertisers.
The Wall Street Journal profiled how Live Connect allows advertisers to deliver banner ads that are designed to resonate with the interests of individual sports fans, on ESPN.com. The first-party data –collected from roughly 106 million users – that ESPN collects from those who visit their website allows them to understand what sports, teams, and players a particular user supports. They are now able to use this information in order to tailor advertising to individuals in a brand new way.
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For years advertisers and online publishers have worked together to geographically target, demographically target and much more, in order to try to reach their intended audience. These types of targeted ads go a long way in helping reach a particular audience, however this approach can fall short. ESPN is hoping to tap into a similar targeting strategy, but they are expanding it to connect their visitors to advertisers, based on the emotional connections of sports.
A majority of ESPNs most profitable coverage centers around live sporting events, and this is what Live Connect will focus on. The idea is to serve ads to visitors in real-time based not just on team affiliations, but outcomes of events and games as well.
In order for this practice to be as effective as possible, Live Connect has to create a lot of different iterations of particular ads. They have created around 1,000 unique banner ads during their trial run on ESPN.com. The ads feature specific content for different sports, leagues, teams and players. When possible, the most effective strategy Live Connect offers is to base an ad on the outcome of a particular game. Think of it as a more highly personalized and far frequent version of television ads after a team wins a championship. Before the game, the outcome is unknown, therefore advertisers have to have multiple versions ready to share.
ESPN has been testing this new ad-serving concept with Dick’s Sporting Goods and Allstate Corp. They hope to use this same strategy for video ads on ESPN.com and other mobile ESPN platforms within a year. ESPN asserts that in some instances Dick’s banner ads’ click-through rates have increased around 50 percent, when utilizing Live Connect.
The Wall Street Journal uses a recent and topical example of how this fan, and team specific targeting works.
For example, shortly after the Oklahoma City Thunder won game six of the NBA Western Conference semifinals last week, fans of Oklahoma reading the article “Thunder roll: Spurs eliminated in OKC,” on ESPN.com were served up a banner ad from Dick’s Sporting Goods that read: “Big Win For Oklahoma City.”
The ad prompted viewers to click to be taken to the sporting goods store’s website to shop for gear. Spurs fans were served up a more generic display ad that read: “Gear Up For The Final Push.”
The idea for advertisers is to become as relevant as possible for visitors to ESPN.com. They are able to connect to the emotional attachment of sports fans in the moment.
The trend of targeting specific audiences is not new. We covered Vizrt and their Viz Eclipse, which is used to display different ads at stadiums, based on where a fan is watching the game geographically. Advertisers and media outlets have to work together in order to provide the most relevant ads.
In a time when the online banner ad is fighting to stay alive, the more closely an ad can connect to a specific user, especially emotionally, the better. Ryan Eckel, vice president of brand for Dick’s Sporting Goods is very excited about the personalized connections that Live Connect can offer. “This [Live Connect] is getting closer to a more useful way to use display… Marketers tend to forget that marketing is still the art of persuasion and right target and right time is great but if you are not relevant in that moment.”
Live Connect has proven to be relatively effective in generating more user engagement with banner ads. As the ESPN tries to generate more advertising revenue, Live Connect will undoubtedly help their cause. Sports fandom creates emotional attachments, and now advertisers will be able to tap into these emotions in real time, based on real outcomes, in order create more advertising engagement.