The big brother of sports sponsorship

When twin brothers Oriol and Gerard Esteban Forch (30) founded the company Camaleonic Analytics SL in 2018 – at just 24 years old! – they could hardly imagine that in less than five years they would become one of the world’s leading figures in sports sponsorship analysis. “We’re still small, but we’re the newcomers who’ve entered the party with something different that the big players don’t like…”, explains Oriol Esteban, co-founder and CEO of the company, with a mixture of shyness and pride.

We're still small, but we're the new ones who've entered the party with something different that the grown-ups don't like..." Oriol Esteban

That something different that displeases the four giants of sports sponsorship analysis, American and British business monsters, is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to measure the impact of sponsorships on their different channels (television, social media, press clippings , and fan insights or analysis of fans' interests and tastes), in order to attribute economic value to their presence. This exhaustive analysis is carried out from offices on Tuset Street in Barcelona , ​​with 15 employees (computer engineers, account managers , salespeople).

In major sports Camaleonic Analytics focuses on sponsorship in major sporting events such as MotoGP, Formula 1, the Endesa League, the Kings League, the Premier Padel, and the America's Cup.

Sports properties such as Dorna and IRTA (MotoGP), Liberty Media (Formula 1), the Endesa Basketball League , the Kings League, the International Cycling Union (UCI), Premier Padel, the Spanish basketball and rugby federations, the Peruvian and Chilean soccer leagues, the American sailing team for the America's Cup; sponsors such as Repsol, Santander, Caixabank, Estrella Galicia, Movistar, Mahou, Mediolanum, Adeslas, and Norauto; public institutions such as the city councils of Madrid and Barcelona, ​​the Community of Madrid, the Regional Government of Andalusia, and the Lusail (Qatar), Silverstone, and Barcelona-Catalunya circuits are under the microscope of Camaleonic Analytics. Teams from La Liga (already including Getafe ) and the Australian rugby league are also on the way; and they are targeting a leap into a powerful market like Indian cricket.

“We started with the idea of ​​developing virtual advertising tailored to each type of audience, but it was very complicated in the technological environment we lived in. There were many external factors that tended to generate errors. We saw that the client's demand was to know the impact of their advertising or sponsorship more quickly, transparently, and in detail, and whether it was working for them, live or the day after viewing it on TV or social media. And we pivoted our business,” says Oriol.

Manual vs AI Most companies dedicated to sponsorship analysis work "manually", literally speaking, stopwatch in hand, stopping television frames, reviewing a video four times

Most companies dedicated to these tasks perform analyses "manually"—literally speaking, with a stopwatch in hand, stopping TV frames , reviewing a video four times, and extrapolating the size of a logo on the screen... Times change, and so does sponsorship analysis. It's a stone age compared to the method used by Camaleonic Analytics, which developed software during the pandemic—completed in 2021—that uses AI to automatically extract the impact of images or audio mentions, whether live or pre-recorded.

Thus, AI analysis allows for quantitative analysis of impacts (the number of sponsorship appearances, the number of verbal mentions in reels , the total and average exposure time, for example, in a MotoGP race, whether it's a static advertisement on the track, or a sticker on a motorcycle, helmet, or rider's suit). But also qualitative analysis using parameters such as image quality and clarity, the area of ​​the screen where it appears, the space it occupies, or whether it coincides with other sponsorship inserts simultaneously.

Clients primarily request information about the time and presence of their sponsorships on screen to assess their financial value—and thus determine the efficiency of their investment, justify the amount paid, or modify parameters to make it more profitable—but they also extract information to explore new areas and business models. They view all of this in the online dashboard , where they can view and compare all metrics and export instant reports with evidence of the analysis.

This is the case, for example, of F-1, which through Liberty Media has contracted a consulting service with Camaleonic Analytics on so-called white spaces : they analyze which assets are not being sold, spaces that can still be exploited to place a sponsorship on a circuit, at a specific strategic point. Thus, at the Canadian GP, ​​the Catalan firm analyzed which corners of the Gilles Villeneuve circuit had the most efficient visibility of the sponsorship (in size and time exposure) during the race broadcast. Thanks to AI, which monitors all the parameters of television production (camera movements, zooms, pans, exposure time, size...), they deduced that a sponsorship advertisement (AWS, from Amazon) using a banner inside a corner was seen 32% more in the chicane before the one where it was placed.

"Advertising or sponsorship loses its meaning when you saturate it. Not everything is worth it." Oriol Esteban

The usefulness of sponsorship analysis is manifold: the results provide the client with guidelines for modifying the placement of an advertisement to make it more selective, or more visible, or more profitable (generating more revenue), optimizing time and space with more programmatic advertising, or even being able to market surpluses (such as the extra exposure of an overtime period). A sponsor, or a facility (a track, a stadium, a pavilion), could get more out of a space, vehicle, or jersey... although there's always the risk of excess, "prostitution," as Oriol Esteban calls it: "Advertising or sponsorship loses meaning when you saturate it. Not everything is valid." This happens, for example, with the multi-colored caravan of the Tour, the Giro, or the Vuelta. Who can distinguish a single brand among so many logos, colors, and shapes?