Wimbledon: Its digital forehand

Following England’s early departure from the World Cup, decorative flags have been winched from their patriotic duty atop the nations’ motor vehicles – but too early*.

*England is still represented in Union Jack

Wimbledon has begun and Great Britain’s reigning champion has kicked off the Championships with a roaring victory.

The glistening jewel in the crown of the world’s tennis tournaments – Wimbledon – could be mistaken as a slightly old-fashioned and gentrified event, shying away from the modern world in fear of its classic image. Don’t let the straw hats and strawberries and cream fool you.

With a worldwide audience, the Wimbledon Championships must deliver digital content across the globe across a range of devices. With 20 million unique desktop users, live streaming, real-time content updates to a range of mobile devices in different formats – Wimbledon has a lot to deliver.

To meet the daunting demands of a baying digital audience, Wimbledon enlists the expertise of  IBM’s Big Data and analytics platform – to capture information from a range of sources and present it in a variety of formats ready for consumption.

This year IBM have created a delicious range of data-rich extras ready for consumers to enjoy, from a redesigned mobile app to a social gauge mapping the tournaments conversation around the globe.

Mobile app

With help from an extensive range of data collected through IBM’s powerful analytics tool, a redesigned mobile app will allow users a much more immersive event. The new app can be personalised to the user’s preferences, and gives access to real time scores, results, news, live video and a myriad of other content.

An impressive innovation, the ‘IBM SlamTracker’, uses historical and real-time data to provide insights to fans, encouraging engagement around the predicted winner of the game.

Social

As seen throughout Brazil’s World Cup, Twitter has been taking a proactive role in mapping social commentary and integrating itself within consumers social experiences – Wimbledon aims to compare.

For the first time, user-generated content – including tweets, pictures and votes – will appear on the big screens on Henman Hill. The audience onsite will be encouraged to respond to match-based questions, and compare their responses with the audience watching at home.

The introduction of ‘Hill vs. World’; a social gauge comparing the conversation occurring on Henman Hill compared to that in the rest of the world, will help boost the tournaments growing social presence. This will include heat maps showing the location of tweets and posts, and encourage engagement by asking questions of the social audience.

Internet

Using IBM’s Big Data and analytics platform, Wimbledon’s system will capture data from across the globe and use it to predict web traffic, allowing a modified approach to supplying demand.

 

Last year, a peak of 17.3m UK viewers tuned in to watch Murray triumph over Djokovic – the enormity of demand means that IBM and Wimbledon’s partnership is more important than ever as the world serves a digital demand with no signs of slowing.