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Mark Penn

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Marketing Frontiers is a new series from Stagwell exploring the methods, mediums, and messes modern marketers will grapple with over the next decade as they chart transformation in the discipline. This January, Stagwell is exploring the new frontiers of Augmented Reality.

Event-based AR can help marketers attract audiences at scale for new forms of shared, blended, and branded experiences.

We tend to envision AR as a means of distraction but there is transformative power in combining the physical and the augmented for highly immersive, interactive experiences.

AR at live sporting events can help create persistent, relevant, and shared experiences that will engage casual fans while enhancing the experience for sports fanatics.

Augmented reality has transformed from a bespectacled fad to an emergent marketing frontier for modern brands in recent years. Still, there is still much work to be done to create AR audiences at scale, attracting the masses.

Why is it hard to scale AR? Because – to date – AR has focused on the individual. We believe that the transformational power of AR is in creating experiences that bring people together around a common place and purpose. Purely functional applications like seeing how a piece of furniture might fit into your home are useful but do little to attract the mass consumer audience AR needs to go mainstream.

What if instead we focus our AR experimentation on augmenting shared experiences like sporting events, in stadiums with captive audiences that are naturally some of the most enthusiastic consumer bases in the world? As sports leagues adapted to the pandemic, marketers learned consumers hunger for more dynamic engagement with their favorite teams and players. They want to get closer to the action, closer to the players, and bond with one another over experiences they’ll remember for a lifetime.

Let’s use AR to get there. We believe sports brands have a strong opportunity to power more immersive and meaningful experiences with the next frontier of augmented reality: event-based AR.

The promise of event-based AR is to bring content to context, providing for more immersive and meaningful experiences connected to the events and people around us. AR can fuel moments of catharsis for the consumer, creating powerful emotional connections to brands, stadiums, and other key fan and player locations.

We already know sports fandom is a lifelong affiliation. Augmented reality can help brands extend that fever into a new dimension, offering interaction, socialization and new forms of connection

ARound helps venues and retailers create augmented reality experiences for live events, bringing audiences together at scale where they can play, interact, and socialize in completely new and exciting ways.

‘Mario Party But With 30,000 People’

Sports marketers can use augmented reality to power stronger consumer experiences with fun, relevant, and shared brand moments.

Building Fun Moments

Every Thanksgiving, one relative is bound to recount an infamous fly-ball he caught from the seats at a baseball game growing up. And even the least sports-engaged Bostonian becomes a model hometown fan when the Patriots are due for more Super Bowl wizardry. Sports marketers know best that the memories fans make at sporting events are some of the most persistent experiences they’ll have in their lives.

So why not use AR to bring more of those experiences to a wider swath of fans?

Everyone might not be able to carry a flyball away with them as a lifelong souvenir, but every fan can experience moments that will turn into memories. With AR, fans in seats with lackluster angles can be brought into the action while players personalities can become larger than life, creating memorable moments that will dominate social media. Adding more experiential touchpoints via AR can make a standard Sunday game fodder for “remember when!” stories for years to come.

Serving Relevant Content

Using AR to add context to content can help brands further engage consumers on location, arming them with an agile new tool for building the compelling experiences that drive value. With event-based AR integrations, brands can adapt flexible content based on everything from proximity to the main stage to the affiliations of fans.  Advertising in-game can be tailored, too, to reflect first-party inputs like a consumer’s favorite sports team, hometown, and more. Ultimately, the tech will serve as a powerful way to recapture and convert attention otherwise lost to consumers’ mobile browsing habits during live events.

Keeping fans engaged before, during, and after the game with personalized content enables a myriad of brand integrations. With just baseline first-party data input by users about team fandom, hometown, favorite players and preferences for merchandise, a whole universe of addressable AR content opens up, activated through their mobile devices.

Creating Shared Social Experiences

Let’s be honest: while fans may be physically captive, of a sort, at in-person sporting events, it’s another game to capture and keep their attention. At the same time, sports is inherently social – something that positions it well to beat the AR trap of failing to scale by being mired in individual experiences. Leveraging AR to extend shared moments through every part of the game will help build closer connections between teams, players, and their fans, bringing talent on the field to life in multi-sensory, bigger-than-life arenas. 

Layering gamified content, player stats and optional replays in AR during games can keep fans focused on and interacting with the field. Brands might stoke team rivalries with interactive competitions during games, with fans’ actions contributing to an aggregate team score. At the end of a game, fans from the winning team might get virtual collectibles or NFTs that build up to larger prizes with more and more engagement at AR-enabled locations, ultimately winning season passes or exclusive IRL merchandise. During intermissions, fans could open their phones to participate in competitions like tug of war fueled by the in-app engagement of 30,000 people, with rival team mascots scaled as AR avatars on the field. You can even imagine beloved mascots like The Phillie Phanatic or Mr. Met swarming the field with AR-doubles for intermission shows that extend beyond the physical to engage fans throughout the entire stadium, not just close to the field.

While our focus is ostensibly on AR moments connected to physical locations and powered by mobile, it’s not hard to see how marketers can activate AR-integrated apps or hardware to plug at-home fans into live sports.

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CONTACT

Beth Sidhu

FEATURING

Originally released on

FEATURING

NEW YORK, Dec. 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Stagwell Inc. (NASDAQ: STGW), the challenger network built to transform marketing, today announced its programming and events at CES 2022, including the formal launch of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Stagwell’s presence includes a range of activations aimed at decoding what the technologies debuting at CES mean for marketers, brands and consumers, including:

• Stagwell Marketing Cloud Exhibit: The Stagwell Marketing Cloud is debuting at CES via a booth featuring four SaaS products powered by AI, ML and AR. The SMC is a suite of technology products and services that support in-house marketing transformation for modern businesses. Visit booth #CS-10 in the C-Space at Aria.
• Live and Virtual Floor Tours: Led by Stagwell executives from across disciplines and leading technologist Jeff Minsky, Stagwell Media Network Global CEO James Townsend and Stagwell Chief Media Officer Deirdre McGlashan we will take guests on a journey exploring the most compelling technologies being debuted at CES 2022, from the connected home and city to health, sustainability, streaming, and robotics.
• Lunch with Stagwell: Leading practitioners in the areas of digital transformation and media will host two separate luncheons, focusing on how new technologies and tools can elevate brand experiences, from navigating the rise of Web 3.0 to transitioning the structural ways businesses implement technologies.
• CES Cocktails: Hosted in partnership with Brand Innovators, we will convene guests from across industries for cocktails, conversation and the opportunity to reconnect after so long apart.

“Stagwell is launching our the Stagwell Marketing Cloud at CES this year. The Stagwell Marketing Cloud is an innovative suite of products aimed at providing in-house marketers with transformative tools. Incubated by technologists and strategists within Stagwell, we look forward to showcasing the Cloud and demonstrating how the collection of SaaS and DaaS tools can help,” says Mark Penn, Chairman and CEO of Stagwell.

At CES, we will showcase four of products from the Stagwell Marketing Cloud including:

• ARound: An augmented reality creation tool for live events that empowers brand to bring audiences together at scale so they can engage, interact, and socialize in a completely new and meaningful way.
• Harris Brand Platform: A real-time business intelligence application that provides daily insights on brand perception, equity, sales funnels and the impact of marketing campaigns on customer behavior and perceptions.
• Koalifyed: An end-to-end influencer marketing application that brings qualified creators and the world’s top brands together to create credible, engaging content and social experiences that drive connection and culture.
• PRophet: A PR application that utilizes AI and ML to predict media interest, sentiment and spread of a press story prior to pitching, allowing PR professionals to discover new targets and more efficiently pitch and land positive coverage.

For more information or to register for any of Stagwell’s events, please visit: https://stagwellces2022.splashthat.com.

For more information on Stagwell Global and our agency network, please visit www.stagwellglobal.com.

About Stagwell Inc.

Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing.  Led by entrepreneurs, our 10,000+ specialists in 20+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com.

Media Contact
Beth Sidhu
beth.sidhu@stagwellglobal.com 
202-423-4414

SOURCE Stagwell Inc.

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FEATURING

ARound brings interactive shared experiences to the metaverse.

NEW YORK, Dec. 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Stagwell Inc. (NASDAQ: STGW) announced today it will launch an innovative, location-based augmented reality platform, ARound, bringing shared experiences to live events and the retail space by engaging audiences through connected interactions in the metaverse. Stagwell will unveil and demo ARound at CES 2022, within its CES booth #CS-10 in the C-Space at Aria and during CES Unveiled on January 3 at Mandalay Bay and Pepcom Digital Experience on January 4 at The Mirage.

ARound helps venues and retailers create AR attractions for live events, bringing audiences together at scale where they can play, interact, and socialize in completely new and exciting ways. Stadiums and sports teams can now engage casual fans or customers by recapturing their attention and personalizing their experiences. Retail consumers will benefit from a more connected, immersive community experience that increases brand engagement.

“Until now, AR has focused on the individual – but ARound recognizes that the best connections come from shared experiences that connect individuals to the world around them,” said Josh Beatty, ARound founder and CEO. “Location-based AR is a relatively new and evolving space, and spatial computing represents the next major computing innovation – one that will focus less on the way we receive information and more on the way we connect with what is around us. While devices often cause distraction, ARound enables users to be more present at events, connecting people and places through shared technology.” 

“Consumers have lost patience for boring, impersonal, and disconnected marketing. And the race for their attention in today’s digital marketplace couldn’t be tighter,” said Mark Penn, Chairman and CEO, Stagwell. “ARound offers clients an opportunity to chart a new course in a powerful – and fast growing – dimension of consumer experiences. We’re proud to support Josh as he works to bring the product to life,” said Mark Penn, Chairman and CEO, Stagwell. 

ARound is currently being trialed by global retailer H&M, as well as a Major League Baseball team at their stadium. More partners will be announced early next year. 

ARound is the newest product from the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, Stagwell’s growing suite of technology products and services that support business transformation for modern marketers. It was developed as the winning idea at Stagwell’s annual innovation competition, which challenges teams to pitch new product ideas to modernize marketing services and pre-empt the needs of tomorrow’s leading brands. As a winner, ARound received capital and resources from Stagwell to build and launch the product as well as ongoing executive mentorship from the company’s marketing and technology services leaders. 

Stagwell Marketing Cloud – powered by a global workforce of 1000+ engineers – arms modern marketers with a toolbox of capabilities spanning influencer marketing, audience segmentation, AI-powered communications tech, competitive brand intelligence and cutting-edge technology in the developing spaces of AI, ML, AR/VR, data processing and fraud detection. Stagwell’s products include Koalifyed, CUE, PRophet, Harris Brand Platform, Telephia, Truly Social, Stage, and Navigator. 

To schedule a product demo of ARound at Stagwell’s CES booth, #CS-10, contact (brand@stagwellglobal.com). To schedule a media interview with AR founder, Josh Beatty, contact Pam Golden at pam@GLAPR.com. 

About Stagwell Inc.

Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing.  Led by entrepreneurs, our 10,000+ specialists in 20+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com.

Media Contact
Beth Sidhu
beth.sidhu@stagwellglobal.com 
202-423-4414

SOURCE Stagwell Inc.