Imagine walking into a stadium that you frequent, and upon entering, your selfie and your name pop up on the nearest screen saying, “Hey, John! Welcome back to the arena. The last time you were here we won! Let’s win again today.” Xperiel is doing things like this and much more at venues across the country with the hope of making the real world more digitally interactive.
Xperiel works with professional sports teams to unify their stadium’s nervous system and technology into a digital playground.
“What we’ve done is essentially build an operating system for this entire space (a stadium),” Xperiel CEO Alex Hertel said. “Now we’re using it as our first-use case to build cool, new sports marketing applications for inside and outside the stadium.”
Founded by Hertel and his brother, Philipp, Xperiel has worked with teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Jets. It also announced last week a partnership with the Sacramento Kings. The partnership includes the launch of a new “Call The Shot” gaming platform that will enhance the fan experience within the Kings’ arena, the Golden 1 Center. The new advanced gaming platform within the Kings’ and Golden 1 Center’s mobile app will allow fans to make predictions in real-time surrounding game action whether they’re at the stadium or watching at home.
“Through technology, we’re using innovation to enhance the fan experience in new and dynamic ways,” Kings chief technology officer Ryan Montoya said in a statement. “We want our fans to connect and feel integrated into the game. Xperiel is helping our fans experience Kings Basketball in a whole new way.”
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The whole idea of this”‘Real World Web” (RWW) platform that Xperiel is using is similar to the augmented reality experience from the popular game Pokémon Go. Both overlay a digital game in the real world with things called geotriggers. These triggers help incentivize people to go to a certain location and perform an action.
“Rather than aiming at millennials and Pokémon fans, we’re aiming at sports fans, a much broader and repeatable audience,” Hertel said.
Hertel mentioned that implementing this RWW in stadiums first provides plenty of advantages. “A stadium has a high-density of technology. They have a jumbotron, scoreboard, iBeacons, cash registers, ticket scanners, turnstile, etc. It’s a lot of technology in a small space.”
All of this technology becomes more important when you consider the “super computers,” as Hertel called them, that fans are bringing to a stadium in the form of a mobile device. “We take the tech in the stadium and we take all the fans’ mobile devices and we unify them into a single digital ecosystem that can be focused.”
The ecosystem that Hertel mentioned has the potential to provide an infinite amount of fan engagement never before seen in a stadium. This is where the term “digital playground” becomes a reality. This “playground” also makes it easier and cheaper for teams to execute targeted experiential advertising campaigns. “You take the correct game, match it with the correct type of fan, then we match that with the correct type of sponsor,” Hertel said. “I don’t think that’s ever been done before.
Rather than bombarding a fan with advertising, this allows a team to create games or experiences that will naturally connect fans to a brand. For example, Xperiel launched a predictive gaming experience for Kings where fans can predict the highest-scoring player or team or rebounder in a given quarter, competing with other fans.
For the New York Jets on the mobile app, fans get four lives to correctly predict when the team will score a touchdown. Once you run out of guesses you can earn one more by going and purchasing a Bud Light and scanning the can. “It ties in a sponsor not just by putting the logo up there but in a much more meaningful way,” said Hertel, who described the sponsorship piece as something a team can sell and sponsors can view as something more effective and potent than other types of advertising.
Fans also can participate in various games and activities where they collect points which can be traded in for virtual and physical merchandise. These goods range from virtual team trading cards (which can be traded between fans by simply bumping phones) to bobbleheads.
“Every team has its superstar. For the Kings it’s probably DeMarcus Cousins, the fans know it and so do the sponsors,” Hertel said. “Inside the team app it says, ‘to get the DeMarcus Cousins card, you have to go to this burger place,’ and there might be a Google map that shows you where to go.”
This type of experiential advertising provides value to both the fan and the burger place. This is just one of the ways that Xperiel aims to break down the traditional barrier between online and offline. According to Hertel, “In our vision of the future there would be no such thing as non-digital advertising.”
Generally speaking, Xperiel has built an engine that can be used to incentivize any behavior. No matter your business goal, there is an experience that can be designed to fill that need. “Really the goal is to take the game experience which is already great and add a whole digital layer on top of that to make it even better,” Hertel said.
No matter if you’re going to a game in the future as a die-hard fan or a passive observer, make sure you’ve got your phone because it’s going to unlock a whole new level of fan interaction.