How WSC Sports Helped LALIGA Leverage AI to Revolutionize Digital Fan Engagement
Summary
As part of their rebrand ahead of the 2023-24 season, LALIGA recognized the need to provide fans with the best possible digital content experience. This meant exploring new technologies to meet fans’ ever-growing demand for personalized content across all LALIGA platforms.
This led to a relaunch of the official LALIGA app in July 2023, with a specific focus on catering to younger fans. WSC Sports made this possible by generating short-form vertical videos and seamlessly publishing them to the app in the form of stories.
Through WSC Sports’ AI-powered platform, LALIGA introduced automation to its content workflows, significantly scaling the output and distribution of personalized video content. This resulted in massive growth across LALIGA’s social media followers, in-app user sessions and dwell time, and a spike in overall video consumption from fans who are now even more engaged with the league’s content.
KEY RESULTS
- 1.4M new followers on social media per week
- 219M followers on social media - the most followed football league in the world
- 70% boost in app user sessions
- 40% increase in app dwell time
Since using WSC Sports’ AI-powered platform to transform its content workflows, LALIGA now creates over 260 thousand match highlights automatically per season, resulting in remarkable growth and engagement.
The Challenge
Scaling Content Production to Meet Fan Demand
LALIGA struggled to keep pace with the increasing demand for content across its website, OTT, social media channels, owned and operated app, and from its broadcasting partners.
Previously they relied on a manual workflow and quickly recognized the need to transform their content creation and distribution processes to engage fans on all platforms—and especially on mobile.
Creating an Immersive Experience
The old version of the LALIGA app focused on match results, calendars, and player stats, but didn’t offer match highlights and failed to deliver the entertainment and personalization that modern fans crave. As a result, fans weren’t spending much time on the app.
LALIGA wanted to create an immersive 360-degree app experience packed with information and entertainment to drive more engagement, while drastically increasing the speed and scale of its content production and distribution. The new app needed to focus on serving fans more of the content they wanted to see while enabling them to tailor the experience to their tastes.
Watch the video below…
The Solution
AI-Powered Personalized Content for Every Platform
LALIGA teamed up with WSC Sports to transform its digital strategy, including the overhaul of its content creation and distribution processes.
Throughout each season, every match from all 42 teams across the top two LALIGA divisions, is ingested in real-time into the WSC Sports platform. From there, content is analyzed, indexed, and tagged to create a searchable video content library. Key moments are then automatically pieced together to create a wide range of highlights in different durations and aspect ratios for use across all LALIGA platforms. The league also shares this content with the teams, players, and broadcasters.
The LALIGA App
To drive younger audiences to the LALIGA app, WSC Sports helped implement In-App Stories (9:16 aspect ratio short-form vertical video content), a format proven to resonate with younger audiences, in particular, Gen Z. The WSC Sports platform automatically crops LALIGA content into stories and reels and seamlessly publishes it to the app, offering users an immersive full-screen highlights experience.
App users can also pick their favorite teams and players to receive dedicated, personalized highlights, with commentary in either English or Spanish.
Unlocking the Archive
LALIGA also ingested its extensive video archive into the WSC Sports platform so the league now has the ability to automatically create highlights from a fully-indexed library of historical gameplay. This allows older fans to relive thrilling moments of the past, while offering younger generations the opportunity to witness the greatness of the league’s legends like Ronaldo, Messi, Ronaldinho, and so many more, repurposed in their preferred format, vertical video.
Takeaways
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Engaging Gen-Z
The LALIGA digital team can now create content to meet every fan where they are, providing infinite storylines around every game in the formats and platforms that fans love.
By automatically creating its video content in a 9:16 ratio in the form of reels and stories, LALIGA was able to achieve its goal of attracting and driving engagement with younger audiences on its new app.
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Empowering the Teams
LALIGA is now able to provide its 42 teams with up to five in-game video highlights to use across their own digital properties during a match.
The expanded reach helps engage a broader fanbase with highlights and storylines that matter most to them.
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Unlocking the Archive
By ingesting its video archive of previous seasons, LALIGA has unlocked a content treasure trove of some of the most sought-after football footage around the world.
The ability to seamlessly repurpose classic matches, previously only available in 16:9, makes LALIGA’s rich history accessible to new audiences for the first time in a vertical video format.
