While GumGum is best-known as an in-image advertising company, CEO Ophir Tanz told me, “Advertising, in my mind, was just one aspect of what we did.”
In other words, he sees plenty of other applications for GumGum’s computer vision technology, which is why the company released a social media product earlier this year, and why it’s now launching GumGum Sports.
The aim of GumGum Sports is to take the logos and branding that you usually see all over sports venues during a game and calculate how much those sponsorships are actually worth. To do that, GumGum examines the TV broadcast and also streaming video and social media conversation to see when a logo or brand image appears, as well as other factors like long it appears and how prominently.
“What we’re attempting to become is the new currency and the new language of sponsorship discussions and valuations,” Tanz said.
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GumGum Sports: Beyond the Broadcast from GumGum on Vimeo.
He added that sports teams and sponsors are trying to calculate these values already, primarily through Nielsen, but it’s mostly a manual process. That means only a small percentage of the footage actually gets watched, and even then, it can take months to see the data. By automating the process, he said GumGum is “adding a much more comprehensive to look at these valuations in near real-time.”
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The GumGum Sports team will be led by Jeff Katz, who was previously the company’s vice president of business development. And GumGum won’t be selling the technology on its own — it will be working with Catalyst Sports and Media, the agency recently founded by Happy Walters and Josh Swartz.
