10x Learning from Soccer Analytics
How Causal AI for Marketing helps Football Club RB Leipzig to kickstart their analytics game… and what we can learn in advertising from this.
How Causal AI for Marketing helps Football Club RB Leipzig to kickstart their analytics game… and what we can learn in advertising from this.
Back in 2014 my dear friend and collaborator Dr. Steffen Schmidt collected a nice dataset about hundreds of Bundesliga games and the statistics of the teams. We built a Causal AI model on it and published results in an article called “Tiki Taka Analytics”.
RB Leipzig took notice of our article and called me up and eventually, we were diving into rich tracking data, covering each millisecond of the game. It took us two months to condense the data into meaningful variables. They described the situation, context, actions, and outcomes in each second of each game of the season.
The resulting insights have been fascinating to me. Turns out that the defense plays a crucial role in creating dangerous situations in the offense. We found certain positions on the field to show a higher chance of scoring. It even turns out that Germany’s most important goals in the 2010’s were all scored from this angle.
This was not known before as spurious correlations blurred the sight of analysts.
“Data give the illusion of insights.
True causal relations are hidden”
Next season, RB Leipzig advanced into the first Bundesliga and then even achieved a Champions league spot. Not sure what our contribution was on this, but obviously it was not harming the progress.
Do you know the movie Money Ball? Most football fans do. And most football fans believe football clubs are already running AI to uncover hidden success patterns.
Think again. It’s like enterprises. Most ads of big brands are still strategized and selected the old way.
Football coaches and sports directors are neither PhDs in Economics, Statistics or Data Science. They are former players.
Similarly, like Art Directors in advertising agencies typically dismiss the power of proper market research and analytics. Because they are former designers and artists.
I strongly believe in the value of their art. But I also strongly believe that the true power lies in the augmentation of both worlds.
Those very few football teams that pioneering the latest AI analytics like RB, show consistently stronger performance, especially in comparison to the budget spent.
“Augmenting the creative human genius
with causal AI can 10x your game.”
The same is true for marketing operations in enterprises.
If you are opening up to augment the holistic creative mind of artists with the explorative evidence that Causal AI can provide,
… you suddenly… 10x marketing impact.
Why? According to multiple studies, 2/3 of advertising impact is not how you spend the money, but the quality of the creative.
Still, 90% of ads show at best mediocre ROIs …
… while a just few ads have a 5 or 10x of ROIs. Causal AI can guide the creative mind to excel in a consistent and plannable way.
Hang on and I may share more about AI-powered insights systems that do just that.
p.s. each week I will come back with inspirations that have the power to contribute to 10x your impact of insights. Subscribe and take me by the word!