Artists are increasingly using AI-powered tools for their creative projects. Alper Yesiltas, an Istanbul-based artist, has posted numerous images of celebrities that have been aged convincingly using AI.

One of his collections is called ‘Young Age(d)’ and uses AI to age well-known (and very much still alive) figures such as Greta Thunberg:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

And the more divisive individual, Justin Bieber:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

However, Yesiltas’ arguably more interesting collection is ‘As If Nothing Happened’ which imagines what deceased celebrities would look like.

The collection includes Freddie Mercury:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

Steve Jobs:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

And the beloved Princess Diana:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

In 2012, a performance at Coachella made headlines after a “hologram” of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur joined Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg onstage. The hologram was created by the special effects production house Digital Domain and portrayed Shakur in his prime.

Thanks to Yesiltas, we can see what Shakur would likely look like today:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

With permission from the artist while they’re alive, combining AI for convincing ageing with holographic technologies could be a way for performers that died early to preserve their legacies and continue delighting old – and even new – fans long after they’re gone.

Yesiltas’ work can be viewed in-person as part of the ‘Digital Serendipity’ exhibition at Akbank Sanat until 11 February 2023.

(Photo by James Kovin on Unsplash)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London.

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Matchday may be the ‘pinnacle’ for sports fans, but for sports clubs, the real battleground is that period between the ‘live-action’ and the ‘actual creation’ of a deep and enriching relationship with their fan base. As competition is heating up to win the hearts and minds of fans through relevant marketing and compete through the ‘noise’, the pressure is on sports clubs and associations to become more innovative. 

But despite the vast data sets at the fingertips of sports marketers, there is much room for improvement when it comes to delivering relevant, personalised communications or messages, experiences, or content to fans in real-time.

Creating a relationship beyond matchday 

To create a relationship that goes beyond game day, sports brands must connect with fans on the right channels at the right time. With zero-party data, or data willingly shared by fans, it’s possible to know what makes fans tick as well as the best ways to engage with them.

How do sports clubs encourage fans to share more of their personal information? You know, the “good stuff” that goes beyond names and email addresses to who they’re attending matches with and if they also watch the game at home, for example. It’s all about the value exchange. And the value exchange begins with data. 

Revolutionising engagement with data 

Data allows sports clubs to move to a more enriched understanding of who their fans are. It gives them insight into their motivations and preferences. The biggest success of the sports clubs we work with is, with Cheetah experiences, fans willingly share their information.

To improve every fan’s experience along their digital journey, it’s vital that the communications they receive from the club are tailored. They have to be personalised to their particular wants and desires. That’s where the data comes in. While content is perhaps the “shiniest” element of the marketing mix; it’s the data and the insights that really make a difference. These elements provide clubs with all the information they need to create bespoke communications, helping to foster that one-to-one relationship with fans.  

Data is also key in creating effective partnerships with brands that want to sponsor sports clubs. Once clubs know more about the fans, their behaviours, and motivations at a country-level, the value of sponsorships can be greatly enriched. That’s because partners are looking for clubs with an engaged fan base, and the only way to get an engaged fan base is to know and create meaningful relationships with them. This in turn, allows clubs to have successful commercial partnerships, which drives revenue into the club – revenue that allows them to invest back into the team and secure top-end spots in competition.

Turning challenges into opportunities

Not too long ago, the customer experience began and ended on matchday. Today, however, that’s simply not the case. In this new digital era, passionate fans are engaging with clubs on different platforms, 24/7. There’s no winter break, pre-season, or rest days for fan engagement – it’s constantly game-on.

Even when the pandemic toppled the athletic landscape, seeing sports ground to a halt with no indication of coming back again; it wasn’t the time to stop engaging fans. Instead, it was more vital than ever to keep their passion alive. Developing new ways to build off of a captive audience who was still hungry for sports was the first order of business for sports clubs and absolutely key to their survival.

But first, these clubs had to turn their unknown audience into a known audience. Digital channels and engagement are vital to helping clubs connect with their fans. It allows them to achieve deep, long-lasting, and meaningful relationships. Once fans feel connected to their clubs, their love grows and that creates a foundation that supports revenue creation and successful commercial partnerships.

However, this is nearly impossible to do without insights from data. Many clubs still have their data in silos where the ticketing team only sees their data, the hospitality team only sees their data, and so on. Getting away from silos and gaining a unified understanding of fans – who they are, what life stage they’re in, and what they want from the club – from top to bottom throughout the organisation is vital to revolutionising engagement.

Take a look at the Barcelona Spotify deal. If Barcelona truly knew its fans better, the deal could have been worth a lot more. However, since they didn’t, they were only able to target about 1% of their fan base — the rest were essentially invisible to them. 

The key takeaway from Barcelona’s unfortunate situation is just how crucial it is to get your fans to share information and permissions with you willingly. It’s absolutely essential in marketing to them more effectively.

And, of course, we can’t talk about effective marketing in today’s world without bringing up the death of the cookie. Never has there been a greater need to get fans to share their personal and preference data willingly than now. Unfortunately, it’s not an “ask and you shall receive” kind of arrangement. Fans are increasingly weary when it comes to handing over their personal information. That’s why sports clubs need to offer an enticing value exchange.

Leverage data for a game-winning loyalty strategy

When it comes to the value exchange, savvy sports clubs know that it doesn’t always have to be a discount or a red-letter prize that entices fans to share their details. Access to exclusive content and community initiatives can also be the catalyst for zero-party data collection.

According to Cheetah Digital’s report for sports teams and associations, 55% of fans will share psychographic data points like purchase motivations and product feedback with sports brands. Even more, half of all fans surveyed said they desire incentives like coupons, loyalty points, or exclusive access in return for their data. 

With Cheetah Digital’s Customer Engagement Suite, there’s an entire platform that makes it easy to build the most relevant, integrated, and profitable customer experiences. Take a look:

• Cheetah Engagement Data Platform: This foundational data layer and personalisation engine enables marketers to drive data from intelligent insights to action at speed and scale.

• Cheetah Experiences: Interactive digital acquisition experiences are delivered to delight customers, collect first- and zero-party data, and secure valuable permissions needed to execute compliant and successful marketing campaigns.

• Cheetah Messaging: Enables marketers to create and deliver relevant, personalised marketing campaigns across all channels and touchpoints.

• Cheetah Loyalty: Provides marketers with the tools to create and deliver unique loyalty programs that generate an emotional connection between brands and their customers.

• Cheetah Personalisation: Enables marketers to leverage the power of machine learning and automated journeys to connect with customers on a one-to-one basis.

Acquisition helps to turn an “unknown” audience into a “known” audience. Why is this important? Well, with “known” fans come a lot of potential in the form of direct revenue, partner revenue, and participation.

The sports clubs to watch

Cheetah Digital has partnered with some of the world’s top sports brands and organisations to create and launch an array of successful campaign experiences with ease. Whether to boost match-day excitement, connect with fans, monetise a global audience, or increase content relevancy to reach a specific demographic; sports organisations are using Cheetah Experiences to create impactful digital experiences that drive results.

Below, we look at how Arsenal Football Club (F.C.) and the FA are leveraging a fully-fledged, zero-party data strategy to connect with fans on every digital channel and collect the preference insights and permissions required to drive personalisation initiatives. 

Arsenal F.C.

Arsenal F.C. intelligently uses data to enhance digital engagement amongst one of the largest and most passionate fan bases in the world – it’s estimated to be upwards of 750 million people! The club built out its omnichannel campaign strategies through various technologies with Cheetah Digital being the main platform. That ensures the communication it sends out is relevant to fans and that it’s communicated on the right platforms at the right times in the right tone. 

Adam Rutzler, Senior Campaign and Insight Manager at Arsenal, says the most crucial aspect of his team’s work is ensuring that fans receive the best content that’s most relevant to them. “We work with a magic triangle, the power of three – transactional data, a demographic segmentation, persona-led approach, and behavioural data,” he explains.

“We get a solid understanding of our fans by taking the combination of these three things and hitting the sweet spot in the middle. What are our fans buying, who are they, and how do they engage with our football club – that’s when we really get the power of understanding our fans, what they want from us, and how we can best give that to them.”

For example, Arsenal has found the score predictor game is well received with fans. It encourages them to guess the score of the upcoming match to win a prize. And that prize can be anything from signed shirts to training kits — whatever fans would desire. 

Where Arsenal has noticed the most traction and where it’s getting some real buy-in from fans, however, is in giving away those money-can’t-buy prizes, such as corner flags from matches. Fans are really excited about these types of prizes. That memorabilia from clubs is truly meaningful to fans who are very passionate about their teams.

Therefore, the experiences that we’re offering and serving up on behalf of the clubs that we work with need to be in tune with fans. They need to offer something fun and something that’s on-brand.

Going forward, Adam says he’s excited about all the possibilities data opens up for the club. “What’s exciting about the insights we’re working with right now to continue understanding our global following is the possibility of turning our triangle into a square by adding psychographic data in.

“We want to understand the fans’ attitudes, aspirations, and personalities. That will allow us to find out what motivates them to engage with certain communications of ours. If we understand that, it would provide us with some very powerful insights,” he says.

The Football Association (FA)

The FA has a grand ambition to double its contactable CRM database by 2024. Achieving this will drive direct revenue, boosting sales for the FA directly. It will increase partner revenue, expanding their reach and resonance with partners. And it will also drive participation in the sport at a grassroots level, which is basically the cornerstone of what the FA does.

In terms of value exchange, the club is achieving above-average conversion rates, using a diverse set of tools like team sectors, man-of-the-match polls, and score predictors for upcoming FA Cup competitions. According to Paul Brierley, CRM & Membership Lead at the FA, the reason the FA’s strategy has been so effective boils down to its value proposition and relevance.

“Cheetah experiences, in particular, are helping us to drive an incredibly effective value exchange with fans. The combination of sought-after prizes, relevance and timing of that prize, and a compelling gamification experience is producing a highly successful channel for fan experience and data growth,” he says.

Future success

Going forward, there’s no other way for a sports club to be successful without understanding its fan base. It’s paramount to capture their motivations, intentions, and preferences at scale to provide a truly personalised experience. By leveraging Cheetah Experiences and offering a value exchange, fans will tell all – the products they desire, what they look for in a loyalty program, and what motivates them to engage. And that information translates to a hugely successful club both now and into the future.

Download this campaign guide packed with examples from leading sports brands and associations that are delivering engaging, interactive experiences in return for fans’ opt-ins and preference data, and then using this data to deliver true personalisation.

(Editor’s note: This article is in association with Cheetah Digital)

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Deepfakes use generative neural network architectures –  such as autoencoders or generative adversarial networks (GANs) – to manipulate or generate visual and audio content.

Lamar is widely considered one of the greatest rappers of all time. However, he’s regularly proved his creative mind isn’t limited to his rapping talent.

For his track ‘The Heart Part 5’, Lamar has made use of deepfake technology to seamlessly morph his face into various celebrities including Kanye West, Nipsey Hussle, Will Smith, and even O.J. Simpson.

You can view the music video below:

For due credit, the deepfake element was created by a studio called Deep Voodoo.

Deepfakes are often used for entertainment purposes, including for films and satire. However, they’re also being used for nefarious purposes like the creation of ‘deep porn’ videos without the consent of those portrayed.

The ability to deceive has experts concerned about the social implications. Deepfakes could be used for fraud, misinformation, influencing public opinion, and interfering in democratic processes.

In March, a deepfake purportedly showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asking troops to lay down their arms in their fight to defend their homeland from Russia’s invasion was posted to a hacked news website.

“I only advise that the troops of the Russian Federation lay down their arms and return home,” Zelenskyy said in an official video to refute the fake. “We are at home and defending Ukraine.”

Fortunately, the deepfake was of very low quality by today’s standards. The fake Zelenskyy had a comically large and noticeably pixelated head compared to the rest of his body. The video probably didn’t fool anyone, but it could have had major consequences if people did believe it.

One Russia-linked influence campaign – removed by Facebook and Twitter in March – used AI-generated faces for a fake “editor-in-chief” and “columnist” for a linked propaganda website.

The more deepfakes that are exposed will increase public awareness. Artists like Kendrick Lamar using them for entertainment purposes will also help to spread awareness that you can no longer necessarily believe what you can see with your own eyes.

Related: Humans struggle to distinguish between real and AI-generated faces

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Mozilla launched a study using a crowdsourced army of volunteers that found, of the content the users regretted viewing, 71 percent were recommendations from YouTube’s AI.

Over the years, concerns have been raised that YouTube’s algorithms have promoted videos that range from stupid but otherwise innocuous to hate speech, conspiracies, abuse, misinformation, and political/religious extremism. The more of such videos are watched, the more they’re recommended and dangerous bubbles are formed where views are solidified and other perspectives aren’t tolerated.

“We now know that YouTube is recommending videos that violate their very own content policies and harm people around the world — and that needs to stop,” Mozilla says.

As a product of Google, one of the global leaders in AI, it seems shocking that YouTube is still serving up such recommendations. It makes many people question whether there’s little incentive to change it as such clickbait keeps users engaged on the platform, for better or worse.

YouTube is the biggest online video provider; reaching more than two billion viewers per month and delivering over one billion hours of view time every day. With that in mind, Google has a huge responsibility to ensure the content it recommends is appropriate.

That’s not necessarily an easy task, but Google should be in a position to manage it. Things like hate speech and extremism have no place on YouTube but Google does have to tread a fine line when it comes to avoiding things like political biases that could be deemed as electoral manipulation.

About nine percent of the videos that Mozilla’s study participants regretted viewing were later taken down from YouTube.

Google has taken steps over the years to try and tackle some of the problematic content on its platform and claims to have made 30 changes to its algorithms over the past year to reduce recommendations of harmful videos. While it arguably hasn’t gone far enough, it deserves some credit for that. However, it seems these efforts have been more effective for English-speaking countries.

According to Mozilla’s study, YouTube’s recommendation of videos that users regretted viewing is 60 percent higher in countries that don’t speak English as their primary language. This was especially true in Brazil, Germany, and France.

The report provides a variety of recommendations to help YouTube and its users tackle the problem.

For users, Mozilla recommends checking your “watch” and “search” histories to clear out anything you don’t want influencing the content served to you.

Mozilla also recommends that YouTube sets up an independent audit of its recommendation systems, be more transparent about borderline content, and provide the ability to opt-out of personalisation altogether.

Lawmakers should mandate some of these things from Google, suggests Mozilla. This includes the release of information and the creation of tools for external researchers to scrutinise YouTube’s algorithms.

You can find a full copy of Mozilla’s report here.

(Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash)

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on November 9-10 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

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Most sports have been established for some time and ‘new’ ones are generally just similar but with some tweaked rules.

Design agency AKQA set out to create a truly new sport with help from an AI – meet, Speedgate.

Speedgate features six-player teams (take that, five-a-side lovers…) which compete on a field with three open-ended gates.

To score, players must first kick a ball through a centre gate which they’re unable to step through. After which, they can score a point by putting a ball through either of the end gates. If a teammate catches the ball and ricochets it back through, an extra point is scored.

To keep things fast-paced, the ball cannot be still for more than three seconds.

Rather than a rewrite of the rules of an existing sport, Speedgate sounds more like a collision of several. There are elements of soccer (I’m a Brit, so don’t tell my mates I called it that but NFL is king…), basketball/netball in terms of not standing still for long, and I’d imagine even some dodgeball.

That’s probably of little surprise when you hear how the AI came to create its new sport.

Data from 400 existing sports was fed into a neural network before it spat out some basic outlines for a sport and its accompanying rules. Some of these rules, while pretty awesome, were unrealistic. Many of us would like to see things like exploding Frisbees – but health and safety people are sticklers.

Playtests were then used to whittle down the sports to one champion. AKQA is now in discussions with the Oregon Sports Authority to get a Speedgate league going this summer.

AI even created the logo and motto, though we think the latter could do with some work (“face the ball to be the ball to be above the ball”).

It’s a cool example of what AI is able to create, but let’s make a pact to keep clips of The Hunger Games locked away. After all, AIs are already beating us at our own creations

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and their use cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo..

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The solution, Credentials Sharing Insight, helps to source missing income for services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

Media research firm Magid claims 26% of millennials share passwords for video streaming services. Parks Associates, meanwhile, predicts that in 2021, $9.9 billion of pay-tv revenues and $1.2 billion of OTT revenues will be lost to credentials sharing.

Jean Marc Racine, CPO and GM EMEA of Synamedia, says:

“Casual credentials sharing is becoming too expensive to ignore. Our new solution gives operators the ability to take action.

Many casual users will be happy to pay an additional fee for a premium, shared service with a greater number of concurrent users. It’s a great way to keep honest people honest while benefiting from an incremental revenue stream.”

Credentials Sharing Insight works by analysing usage patterns of a user and flagging suspicious activity.

Once a video streaming provider subscribes to Credentials Sharing Insight, when suspicious patterns are found about users it will return a probability score — indicating how certain the system is that it’s found an infringer.

This score puts the power into streaming providers’ hands over how strict they want to be. A solution which ends up accidentally blocking users for legitimate use is unlikely to lead to continued loyalty.

Various measures can also be put in place for the severity of the offence. A person sharing their password to a family member, for example, could be prompted by email to upgrade to a premium account which allows it. Someone profiting by selling access to an account to many people could be hit with a fine.

Synamedia claims that Credentials Sharing Insight is already in trials with a number of pay-TV operators and is available as either a cloud or on-premise offering.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and their use cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

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