digital experiences Archives

Kevin Murphy, Vice President and Head of Ericsson Levant Countries and Global Customer Unit Ooredoo, explains how the combination of 5G, AR and VR is creating completely new user experiences.

Sports fans are a passionate breed and whether they’re at the match or on their couches, they demand the full experience. For fans, and athletes alike, leading technologies enrich the sporting experience, bringing people closer to the action, and creating new immersive ways to showcase the commitment, excitement, and teamwork of sports.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a growth in digital experiences which may become permanent. The increase in virtual events is raising the bar for the quality and design of the experience, with audiences becoming increasingly sophisticated, demanding a more social, innovative and engaging event.

To transform the digital experience for fans, players and support staff alike, three main types of support is required; a sports performance information system, a digital experience backend system, and technology consulting and innovation services.

The combination of 5G, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) supports completely new user experiences in sports – pushing boundaries and taking the consumer to the heart of the game itself. For a team playing before a packed stadium or a lonesome runner on a forest track, connectivity and mobility enable new values in an emerging internet of sport.

This is where 5G can be a vital tool for the sports sector, as it seeks to re-invent the fan experience at home and at the sports arena. Sporting events could better serve both the travelling fan attending every game in person and the die-hard fan catching the game remotely.

In this age of digital and mobile consumption, fans expect an experience boosted by their mobile devices. Through live-streaming video, mixed reality experiences and real-time access to information about the game, the next generation in mobile wireless technology can create an enhanced experience, reinventing how fans participate in sports.

Immersive Sporting Experiences at Home

Sports fans today are looking for new ways to connect to the sporting experience digitally. There is potential to create more immersive fan experiences with the introduction of 360-degree cameras, and virtual and augmented reality. Fans can walk the sideline, see what the goalkeepers are seeing, or join the victory celebration in the locker room – all serving the purpose of bringing fans closer to the action at the venue from home.

What’s more, the trend of increased solitary viewing due to the development of personal screens and on-demand viewing could be reversed thanks to the capabilities and promises of Virtual Reality (VR). It can provide a way to connect with friends watching the game at different physical locations, creating a “virtual hangout” for the times you can’t be there in person.

VR also brings an exciting prospect to the table: the ability to watch 4K/UHD content without owning a big physical screen and allowing on-demand viewing to become more of a social activity than it is today. Soon, friends and people with similar interests can watch content together in a VR living room, viewers will have the freedom to look anywhere in every scene of a movie and consumers can experience a football match with other fans in a VR arena, as if they are actually there.

And for sports fans in areas that don’t have access to fibre coverage, 5G enables fixed wireless access applications for very high-quality video streaming in 4K video, 360 or AR/VR formats.

This means that you get to watch the 4K video on your mobile device. But 5G is also so fast and so reliable that it will make fixed wireless a real challenger in the broadband market, streaming 4K video wirelessly to your big screen TV as well. And it’s not just the quality either. You’ll be able to choose what camera angles you like, or if you want information overlaid on the screen, or if you want to watch in VR or not.

Creating the Connected Stadium

A great experience at the arena is fundamental to enjoying live sports. Where fans today see broadband connectivity to their smartphone for social media posts as table stakes, there is so much more that could be done digitally to connect fans to the action. This is an area where 5G can improve the overall experience, compared to standard WiFi solutions.

5G can expand the experience for fans at the game, creating new possibilities by connecting sensors in balls, goals, and even players – all in real-time with extremely low latency. The next generation technology can deliver enough capacity to the stadium for fans to stream high-quality video and share the views from their seats with others at the same match.

Other future changes coming to the fan experience with 5G connectivity include the ability to experience matches from new vantage points, using phones to switch between different 360-degree, ultra-high definition virtual reality cameras filming all around the stadium.

The introduction of 5G at a stadium also creates a horizontal platform to serve additional applications. Fans would be able to monitor and track athletes’ performance during practice and competition in real time, for example. This represents a major opportunity for service providers to deliver enhanced networks in stadiums and arenas to ensure their subscribers are well connected.

Sourced from Khaleej Times

By Christine Moorman

Optimism among marketers plummets to levels last witnessed during the Great Recession. Optimism about the economy is 50.9 (out of 100) compared to just three months ago when it was 62.7. In February 2009, following the Great Recession of 2008, this rating was 47.7. B2C companies are more pessimistic than their B2B counterparts, as are larger revenue companies (>$10B) compared to their smaller counterparts (<$25M).

Against this backdrop, The CMO Survey conducted a Special Covid-19 Edition survey, asking marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies to share their survival strategies, KPIs, and predictions about the future. Here are the top results.

1. Marketing jobs lost: Although 62% of marketing leaders reported no job losses in their companies, 9% of marketing jobs have been lost, on average, due the pandemic. The largest percentage of marketers (24%) anticipate these jobs will never return. Planned marketing hiring drops to the lowest point in CMO Survey history, going negative for the first time ever with average hiring predicted to be -3.5% in the next year.

2. Customer prioritize digital experiences: Marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic (85%), increased value placed on digital experiences (84%), and greater acknowledgements of companies’ attempts to “do good” (79%). Marketers expect this increased focus on digital to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.

3. Marketers pivot digital: Given customer shifts, marketers are, in turn, adjusting their offerings and pivoting their businesses. Some 60.8% indicate they have “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% are “transforming their go-to-market business models to focus on digital opportunities.” Consistent with this, CMO Survey results show the largest single drop in traditional advertising spending (-5.3% expected over the next year), further solidifying the shift toward digital.

4. Marketing budgets hold: Despite headcount loss, 30.3% of marketers—the largest segment—have experienced no change in their overall marketing budgets during the pandemic with 41.3% reporting gains and 28.4% reporting losses. On average, marketers report they have gained about 5% in their budgets during the pandemic and expect an 8.4% increase in digital marketing spending over the next year.

5. Marketing objectives remain modest: When asked what objectives they are focused on during the pandemic, the #1 and #2 responses from marketers are “building brand value that connects with customers” and “retaining current customers.” Consistent with this, marketing employees were leveraged more for “getting active online to promote the company and its offerings” (69%) and “reaching out to current customers with information” (65%) compared to growth objectives such as “generating new products and service ideas” (44%) or “building partnerships” (41%).

6. Marketing leadership promoted: 62.3% of marketers report that the marketing function has increased in importance during the pandemic. Building brand and customer retention through digital, mobile, and social strategies are reported to be key to that heightened role. This importance is striking given 9% marketing job losses—marketers are doing more with fewer people.

Chart: How has the role of marketing in your company changed during the Covid-19 pandemic? — THE CMO SURVEY

7. Social media shines bright: 84.2% of marketers say they have used social media for brand building and 54.3% say they have used it for customer retention during the pandemic. Given this focus, marketers have increased investment social media budgets 74% since February—an increase as a percent of marketing budgets from 13.3% to 23.2%. This strategy appears to have worked: For the first time in CMO Survey history, the rated contributions of social media to company performance rose—up 24% since February. This is an important finding because social media contributions have previously remained flat and at average levels since 2016 despite rising investments.

8. Online sales performance increases: Online sales have grown to the highest level in The CMO Survey history. They now constitute 19.3% of sales—a 43% increase over just three months ago. Small companies (with fewer than 500 employees) are taking advantage of selling online, with ecommerce accounting for 26.1% of sales.

What percentage of your firm's sales is through the iI — THE CMO SURVEY

9. Overall sales revenue drop 17%: Despite online sales gains, marketers report major losses across sales revenue, profits, and customer acquisition during the pandemic. Biggest reductions are to sales revenue, which dropped 17.8% on average, with 16.9% of marketers reporting the loss of over 50% of their revenues. Considering winners and losers, 64% of marketers report sales losses compared to 30.3% that report gains and 5.2% reporting no change. Marketers expect these sales revenues to increase 4.2% in the next year driven by the view that consumers’ current lower likelihood to purchase (67%) and unwillingness to pay full price (43%) will return to pre-pandemic levels within 6-12 months.

10. Pandemic weakens environmental focus: Covid-19 has also dampened marketers’ likelihood to make changes to reduce their offerings’ negative impact on the ecological environment. The number of marketers indicating a willingness to change their products or services to reduce their negative environmental impact has dropped from 72.9% to 52.7% with attention shifting to easier-to-implement marketing promotions (58%). More marketers report that Covid-19 makes sustainability efforts seem “like a luxury” than it “created opportunities to increase sustainability efforts” in their companies.

11. Use of influencers expected to rise: Marketers report that 7.5% of their marketing budgets is focused on online influencers, mostly on LinkedIn, company blogs, Instagram, and Facebook, and that they anticipate large gains in the use of influencers in the next three years (up to 12.7%).

Detailed analysis of these and other results are available here. I hope these findings from our Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey are useful as you navigate these next few months and beyond. I will be taking a deeper dive into these findings during a webinar on June 25^th at 1PM Eastern sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the American Marketing Association. You can register by following this link. I look forward answering your questions and taking your comments.

THE CMO SURVEYSurvey Results Archive – The CMO Survey

digital experiences

Is virtual the new frontier of sports?