Aviva used its pitch side advertising inventory at the Republic of Ireland Vs Austria game to promote the fan pic digital experience it runs with Irish company Huggity.
It has become a feature of all the international games played at the stadium where the company takes high definition pictures of the crowd at the stadium and you can then identify yourself or friends and share the image through social media.
Aviva benefits through creating a longer tail to the experience of visiting the stadium and similar ‘fan pics’ have also been taken at Anfield and major music festivals.
The images take around 24 hours to render and display which may need to be speeded up in order to capture the immediacy of the moment.  The experience of being at a game is sharpest the closer it is and the opportunity to look at yourself in the stadium is more likely to be taken up the closer it is to the time of the match.
That said, a total of 5,349 fans at last October’s Germany match tagged themselves in the fan pic from that match, representing almost 11% of the match attendance.  Given that was a game to forget it shows the potential for a deeper engagement with fans.
Aviva also employed Huggity’s technology at the Rugby Premiership Final at Twickenham last May and got over 9,000 tags from an attendance of 80,000. The most successful deployment so far was the more than 20% engagement from fans who were there when Celtic beat Barcelona this season in the Champions’ League.
The fan pic home page, hosted at the sponsors site has a number of sticky options and promotions about the advantages of being an Aviva customer when it comes to sporting benfits through the insurers association with both soccer and rugby.
Given that the life time value of securing a customer in this area is high, it does not take many individual sales in order to recoup the cost of the promotion.
Up until the 92nd minute last night’s game seemed to be one of those that would certainly strike a chord with the 36,100 attendance on the night and those ‘I was there’ moments are most likely when the Fan Pic experience will have greatest effect.
Huggity is based at the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin and has now expanded to a team of more than 10 with an office in London’s Google Campus an indicator of it’s ambitions beyond the domestic market.
The next Sport for Business Members’ Round Table will take place at the Aviva Stadium on Thursday, April 25th.  To find out more click here.

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