Foxtel: Monty's Wicket Warnings

Challenge

Cricket is the soundtrack to the Australian summer and has always been on free to air TV. Then Foxtel paid AUD $600m to secure broadcast rights – meaning Aussies had to pay to watch. However, complicated broadcast laws meant some major matches were still on free to air competitor Channel 7. Our challenge was to acquire new subscribers, reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) by 40%, steal share of free-to-air viewing and become the number one channel on Foxtel.

Insights and Idea

In a long game like cricket, people watching live often miss the big moments. They go to the toilet, to the beach; they miss the few seconds that really matter and have to watch on replay. A typical five-day cricket match sees a maximum of 40 wickets in 2,700 balls, so it is no wonder so many people miss them! Our answer was to create ‘Monty’ – the world’s first AI predictive sports commentator. Monty predicts when a big moment is about to happen during a live game (a wicket) and makes sure you don’t miss it.

Delivery

Monty is a machine learning model. Instead of buying media inventory with our media budget, we bought historical and live cricket data from Opta, investing 3:1 into data against media. We trained Monty on this data – all 28,720 balls bowled by the Australian Men’s team in a year – nick-naming him ‘Monty’ after the first wicket he predicted in training – England’s Monty Panesar. Once we were confident he was fully operational, we created an API output that triggered time-sensitive adverts alerting Foxtel subscribers to tune in to watch the next wicket across mobile and digital OOH. The alert would help subscribers make the most of their subs and for non-subscribers, push them to sign-up to ensure they never missed the action. In live play Monty tracked 83 variables (pitch conditions, type of delivery, pitch temperature etc) for every single ball. He overlaid his training data with what happened five minutes earlier in live play, to predict what would happen in the next five minutes. When he predicted a wicket was going to fall, he triggered creative across pre-roll video, mobile display and outdoor billboards with a call to action to tune in to Fox Cricket and watch the wicket. Fans asked Fox Cricket for Monty’s call through the Google Assistant during live play and an API was integrated into the Fox Cricket app for instant predictions.

Results

For the first time ever, the viewer was not watching replays but was ahead of the game. Monty transformed the live sport experience in Australia and plans are now underway to deploy Monty into other sports.

• weekly sales increased 18%
• CPA 61% below average
• Fox Cricket #1 for share – and brand recall doubled
• Free to air Channel 7 share dropped to 20.8% from 49.9%
• Correctly predicted 1,867 wickets in 74,700 balls with 87% accuracy
• Monty is being turned into a standalone subscription product for News Corp’s Supercoach fantasy platform