Should sports brands use augmented reality to enhance fan engagement?

Stephen Shaw is Head of Agencies at Blippar. A key member of the original team, Stephen has an extensive experience on how to build interactive digital experiences. He's a Liverpool season ticket holder, which, as you can see from the pictures, has taken its toll on his hair follicles over recent years. Here, in an article first published by Masterclassing.com, he explores how sports clubs and brands should be using augmented reality solutions both in-store and at their venues to enhance the fan experience, boost engagement and encourage loyalty.

Stephen Shaw with Liverpool's Kenny Dalglish in 1977

For any UK football fan over the age of about 15, the phrase ‘Where are you?! Let's be havin' you!’ will bring back memories of celebrity chef and Canaries super-fan Delia Smith shrieking through the microphone half-time at Carrow Road in 2005, when a (then) average Manchester City overcame a two-goal deficit to defeat Norwich City 2-3.

Presenting at the Mobile Marketing Masterclass for Sport, it struck me - as both a football fan and commercial member of an augmented reality platform – that the UK's football industry has been extremely slow in adopting augmented reality (AR) within their media mix.

In the USA, image-recognition and AR technologies have already been used by sports franchises including the NBA, MLS and NFL, by both clubs and sponsors alike. But in the UK sports space there is a reticence when it comes to tapping into this new technology, despite it being a proven and dynamic channel, ripe for fan engagement, and one that can genuinely help boost fan advocacy of club sponsors.

Sport magazine's first ever interactive issue, made blippable

If you're not familiar with Blippar, we are the world’s leading visual browser, using image-recognition and augmented reality technologies to help brands, agencies, publishers, educators and, in fact, all content-owners to bring physical objects and images to instant digital life on mobile phones and tablets. Blipping these objects via our free app makes them burst into life on mobile screens with exclusive videos, music, interactive image galleries, games, coupons, informative web-links, competitions, shareable virtual try-on photo opportunities and more.

In sports, these ‘physical objects’ could be logos, apparel, kit, programmes, magazines, products, signage and merchandising, while the digital content offered could be a free mobile game, an exclusive video tour of the club, free tickets to a match, season programmes, league table links, or the chance to enter a competition to meet your team. Or all of these at once.

Watch this video of Pepsi's blippable #futbolnow campaign

For example, AR offers a unique response to the annual backlash from consumer groups and parents about the costs of replica football kits at the start of each new season: the technology genuinely lengthens the shelf-life of a kit by making its logos interactive, and packing the shirts with real-time digital content – all that needs to be refreshed (for free) is the content of the AR experience, hosted on a server.

One of Blippar’s first forays into UK football saw Portsmouth Football Club use our DIY platform Blippbuilder to bring their match day programme to life with interactive pages.

Readers were offered exclusive club videos, accessed by downloading the Blippar app and blipping clearly signposted pages. The results were impressive: 4,000 copies of this first interactive programme were blipped 3,000 times.

Blippar collaborated with Portsmouth FC to make their match day programme blippable

Non-sports brands are also capitalising on Blippar's unique ability to engage high-passion sports fans with exciting and exclusive sporting content. A superb example of this is Pepsi, whose UK team worked with us to create a stunning interactive mobile campaign, delivering unique Pepsi-branded football content ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Pepsi have since revealed that their #Futbolnow campaign – which offered an exclusive mobile game, a free downloadable music album, and football videos featuring international players Sergio Ramos, Sergio Agüero, Jack Wilshere and Leonel Messi - saw fans spend the time equivalent of over 35,000 football matches engaging with the blipp’s content. Close to 1.2 million consumers engaged with the campaign, blipping over 2.4 million times.

Statistics from Blippar's #futbolnow campaign with Pepsi

But despite this monumentally successful AR campaign – plus recent collaborations with Wolves (Wolverhampton Wanderers) and even Fenerbahce – most of the UK football industry is dragging its boots within the space.

Gradually, Premiership giants are waking up to the power of layering physical content with digital experiences, and the benefits modern channels such as AR can offer fans, clubs, advertisers and sponsors as part of their sports marketing mix. Saying that, enormous budgets are not needed to create successful and engaging AR campaigns – as clubs such as Portsmouth FC have already proven.

But they need to wake up quicker. In the words of Norwich FC's own Delia Smith: ‘Where are you? Where are you? Let's be havin' you!’

Watch Blippar's sports brand campaign videos here.

Delia Smith at Carrow Road in 2005