SVG Europe Sit-Down: SAP’s Inna Tokarev Sela discusses ‘Computer Vision’ and Cloud security

Inna Tokarev Sela, Director of Business Development and GTM | Machine Learning, New Ventures and Technologies, SAP

SAP helps clients grow their customer base and increase profits by anticipating preferences, providing compelling content, and delivering personalised offers and services – wherever those customers choose to engage – with a single, real-time media platform that provides insight into customer behaviour. In addition, its software can help clients improve player and team performance, run venues more simply, and maximise revenue by streamlining operations and increasing visibility into customer data and analysis.

Director of Business Development and GTM | Machine Learning, New Ventures and Technologies, Inna Tokarev Sela, spoke to SVG Europe to provide a deeper insight…

Can you explain how SAP Brand Impact benefits broadcast sports production sponsorship?

Media agencies, broadcasters and brands require accurate and fast insights to better understand how their exposure in professional sports productions affect brand reputation. They need to efficiently assess growing volumes of video content, create in-depth analysis, and answer questions about sponsorship and advertising benefits. With SAP Brand Impact application, they can measure and understand the value of their sponsorship campaigns by using advanced computer-vision techniques for automatic logo and product placement recognition in videos, which gives them the opportunity to gain accurate, timely insights into sponsorship ROI (Return on Investment).

How quickly is the analysis available to advertisers?

Once the system is pre-trained to identify specific objects in a specific sport, clients upload the footage of the event they are set to analyse, and the computer analysis starts instantly. The rate of this analysis is double-digit times faster than the video length. So, for example, if we want to analyse a video of a 90 minutes soccer game, the processing will take under 9 minutes. When you compare this speed to the amount of time it takes to analyse in traditional manual counts, we’re talking of a rate which is about a hundred times faster. Another aspect of the availability of the results is the use of an online interface which we offer our customers. The interface enables them not only to upload the videos, but also to see and explore the results in different formats immediately after the processing.

Your promotional material says that users can measure ‘what they pay for – and beyond’. What is this ‘beyond’ factor?

Using computer vision is a new approach to brand exposure measurement. As mentioned before, until now the main method for sponsors to check how much exposure they actually got was to have it reviewed by people watching the videos and manually marking each appearance they could spot. The ‘beyond’ factor refers to the wide range of possibilities that computer vision and machine learning opens. The implication of the fast analysis and delivery, for example, is not only the ability to scale dramatically and analyse a huge amount of video hours, but it also enables sponsors to quickly respond to the results and adjust their campaign and marketing activities accordingly. Conducting A/B testing for signage during a tournament is one example. Additional benefit of machine learning is the accuracy and depth of the data that can be generated. In the same process, we deliver various of indicators for each brand appearance such as its size and position in the frame as well as deliver the data in different formats, such as csv files, interactive dashboard, heat maps and diagrams enabling business insights. Our belief, abilities and, above all, the need of our customers to make decisions based on real data is driving us to provide them with as much transparency as possible. For example, a B2C brand could cross-validate their sales data with the second-by-second appearance results of their brand on the screen.

What training is available for those utilising your solution?

Brand Impact is a standalone, cloud-based solution, which means it does not require any local installation, we like to call it a ‘turnkey solution’. Since we provide our clients with an intuitive, interactive online interface, there is no real need for an extensive training. We have a simple onboarding process when we first open a client account, it is as simple as opening any website account. SAP has multi-tier layers of support and even dedicated “success manager” to ensure customers’ satisfaction with its solution at the stages of adoption. 

SAP Brand Impact is a cloud-based service. How do you convince doubters about the security of The Cloud?

Brand Impact is a part of SAP Leonardo, introducing new and innovative technologies. As it is an integral part of SAP, it is well aligned with SAP standards, including data privacy, security and GDPR.

Let me quote from SAP’s website – and this applies to all of its cloud-based solutions.

“With more than 87,000 employees in over 130 countries, SAP is uniquely qualified to stay on top of ever-changing global and local regulations. Dedicated teams located in-country ensure SAP stays on top of local legal requirements to ensure they are included in the products. We are constantly improving our cloud solutions by staying ahead of the latest threats, building security into every layer of our cloud offerings, and adapting to the latest compliance standards. Know that our cloud offerings meet the latest compliance and security standards worldwide. The rights of individuals are respected and protected during the processing and use of information, in particular around data protection and privacy.”

Are there any future plans you can share with us?

SAP Brand Impact allows high speed analysis of brand exposure

As the sponsorship market is constantly growing and the media turns more and more to video, we continue to scale, improve and support this growing number of video hours to be analysed. We are also in the midst of our global expansion and are equipped with the most advanced computing platforms in the market, specifically designed for AI and deep learning algorithms we run. We are making sure that we are responsive to feedbacks from our customers and to provide them with the tools and information they need to apply prompt data-driven decisions.

Do you have a European sports related case study you can share?

Audi Summer Cup – 2018 soccer tournament organised and sponsored by Audi in Germany and China. SAP Brand Impact was used by Future Sports, the Audi Media Agency for the brand exposure analysis.