Introducing GumGum’s panellist for the Sports Publisher Summit: Louise Colyer

Everyone involved in publishing, advertising and website monetisation recognises that there are numerous industry challenges, including a potential shift in the way the industry fundamentally functions. Digital Sport’s Sport Publisher Summit on Monday 28th October will look to industry experts to help explain how they are dealing with these new challenges, what the solutions will be, to evaluate where the industry heading in the longer term and, also, to explain how its applying its technology to the business of sports sponsorship.

Digital Sport is delighted to announce that Louise Colyer, Senior Director of Supply at GumGum, will be one of our panellists. We had the pleasure of speaking with her ahead of the event about the value of advertising, quantifying video advertising frame-by-frame and how contextually targeted adverts can reshape the digital advertising landscape. Before exploring all the facets of her work, we wanted learn a little more about GumGum and its work with Snack Media.

“GumGum is an AI company focus on applied media and advertising solutions,” Colyer explained.

“We’re headquartered in Santa Monica, California, but we have offices all over the world including Europe, Australia, Japan and Canada. We started working with Snack Media soon after we opened our UK office in 2016. GumGum’s proprietary technology allows us to process page content using a combination of natural language processing and computer vision AI.

“We’re the only contextual solution that applies image recognition tech. Since so much of the context on the web is visual today, it’s the image tech piece that allows us to give our advertisers the most accurate contextual targeting in the market. In our post-GDPR world, data privacy preserving solutions are in high demand. And our product set, with its focus on context and content-advert alignment, can satisfy that demand.”

Colyer then outlined the core advertising formats that GumGum runs which deploy its contextual tech.

“We have an array of offerings, but GumGum is best known for its In-Image and In-Screen formats. The former is a banner anchored to the bottom of an image. The latter is a persistent footer, like the adhesive sticky banners that you see quite often on mobile. In both instances, we process the page content through our AI to ensure that we’re as contextually aligned as possible.”

GumGum’s contextual analysis capabilities – particularly its computer vision AI – provided the foundation for a new technology that is revolutionising the business of sports sponsorship: AI-powered automated sponsorship valuation. The ability to understand the true advertising value of sponsorship placements can be crucial not only for those paying for sponsorship but also for the sports clubs and other stakeholders who own the sponsorship inventory.

This is exactly what GumGum Sports does and what makes its services so exciting. In the pre-digital era, sponsorship values could only be inferred through manual analysis that made them nearly impossible to quantify. Today, GumGum has harnessed technological and data collection advancements to digitally deliver monetary valuations at scale for all sports sponsorship.

Colyer explained how its Sports division’s tech was born: “For advertising, we had developed proprietary AI technology that was able processes video on a frame-by-frame basis in order detect logos and other recognisable objects. In Advertising, we were developing it for contextual targeting and brand safety, but it was really still in development when we recognised that its logo detection capabilities were ready for prime time.

“We saw that sports sponsorship valuation presented a great use case for the tech and that’s why launched GumGum Sports in 2017, where we apply the tech helping brands and rights-holders capture the full media value of sports sponsorships, including signage and social media. More recently we’ve been seeing spends from E-sports increasing, because we can also monitor and serve sponsorship within streams.”

Between technology advancing and shifts in consumer behaviour, the industry is changing and GumGum is having to adapt, but Louise gave us some insight into the direction she believes the industry is heading.

“It’s a blessing and curse that digital advertising changes as quickly as it does. Not even ten years ago, many media owners were not even selling their own mobile traffic. Now we see mobile as the most prominent digital advertising device.” she explained. “We’re able to measure more than ever before, to the detriment of advertising perhaps, especially in terms of pricing. But measurement is a key influence on marketing spends and the usage or data and true metrics are here to stay. So it’s good to have a technology like ours that works for both the publisher and advertiser.”

For more information on the upcoming Sports Publisher Summit, click here, or purchase a ticket below.

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