Virtual Board Replacement: Customized Localized Adverts Used At UEFA EURO 2024

The latest innovation in stadium and on-screen sports advertising is virtual LED advertising. Simply said, Virtual Replacement Technology allows marketers to target diverse demographics with their perimeter board advertising by providing numerous digitally superimposed “feeds” for each audience. This is also popularly known as Virtual Replacement Perimeter Overlay.

Virtual advertising is the insertion of virtual advertising graphics into a live or pre-recorded television presentation, most typically during athletic events, using digital technology. When airing the same event in other regions that are not concerned with local marketing, this method is widely used by broadcasters to allow them to substitute real advertising panels (on the playfield) with virtual pictures on the screen. A Spanish football match will be shown in Mexico, filled with Mexican commercials.

Examples

On 14 June, the UEFA EURO 2024 Football Championship kicked off in Germany. Most Chinese fans noticed the Chinese billboards on the sidelines, and the Weibo topic garnered 1.7 million views. Upon comparison with the live view, it can be observed that, except for a small portion of Chinese language advertisements, most of them in the TV broadcast are virtual.

This means that the same Chinese sponsors are displayed in English on the scene, while the related product advertisements appear in Chinese in the live TV broadcast. These Chinese adverts are “China-specific” virtual real-time adverts, marking the first time the competition has introduced virtual board replacement (VBR), which replaces specific adverts displayed on LED billboards in stadiums with ads tailored to the target market.

Chinese fans are not the only ones to see these special adverts. According to UEFA, this year’s championship provides four sets of broadcast signals: the international public signal, and exclusive signals for the host country Germany, China, and the United States.

A total of eight Chinese adverts were produced for Chinese consumers: Ali, Alipay, Atos, Booking.com, BYD, Hisense, visitQatar, and Vivo. Hisense was the only one that took a more traditional approach, as the Chinese characters displayed in its adverts were placed globally and didn’t utilise virtual technology. Additionally, for social impact reasons, the official gambling partner of this year’s UEFA Europa League, Betano, has been uniformly replaced with a foundation and official UEFA public service announcements in the Chinese broadcast signal using virtual advertising technology.

Applications

Virtual insertion technology frequently employs automated techniques such as automatic detection of playfield bounds, automatic detection of cuts, recognition of playfield surface, recognition of existing logos for logo replacements, and so on.

Technology

The visual control of the effect is usually handled by an operator, however recent systems allow for the employment of the instant replay operator. This is accomplished through the integration of next-generation LED technology, specialised optics, and advanced software into the venue’s and broadcast production’s procedures and workflows. The perimeter advertising material is seamlessly integrated in real time, allowing firms to provide personalized content in local dialect to separate audiences or sell inventory to entirely different groups of advertisers in each territory.

Technical Process

To give you an example of how they can accomplish this:

The camera is attached to a “virtual head” that reads the positioning and alignment information. That camera’s lens is calibrated with the camera body and sensor, as well as the software, so that the virtual software can be adjusted for any offset off “zero” when the camera was mounted.

Consider a virtual 3D box, where the user simply instructs the computer on where everything should be placed in relation to the camera.

The virtual software receives data from the camera and feeds it to a computer. Following the calibration, the virtual operator will load in the graphics they’ve been instructed, which have been created according to the specifications they’ve been given.

They then use various keys to mask out which virtual graphics to appear on and which they don’t want to appear on.

This same technology is used to create virtual billboards, as well as distance lines (for example, in horse racing, ice hockey), stat overlays, on-ground logos and images, and even entire studios.

The Marketing Essence

Customers’ desired level of targeting presently corresponds to the primary geographic audiences for their sport — where sponsor and advertisement demand is high. When the technology is employed in La Liga games between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, for example, at least 8 feeds are produced and sent to the various broadcast zones throughout the world, with a focus on Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and even specific countries like Mexico and Turkey are all addressed.

Virtual Hybrid also opens up entirely new avenues for individualised advertising. While audiences are currently segmented primarily by geographic regions, we foresee a future in which augmented reality digital replacement content in sport is targeted much more personally in the future, using the same data models and ad-tech technologies that are increasingly common in most other digital content sectors today.