Tech
“We’re using it as a tool to inspire us,” Stars VP of marketing Joanne Lovato told SBJ.
Dallas Stars
The Dallas Stars are using artificial intelligence-based tools across multiple facets of their business, driving incremental revenue in ticket sales (profiled in the SBJ Tech newsletter last week) and creativity in marketing.
Stars VP of marketing Joanne Lovato recalled a serendipitous beginning to the latter trend during the 2023 offseason.
“One of our producers was playing with a couple of tools,” Lovato told SBJ in a recent interview. “He went into the algorithm and typed in something like hockey on the moon – something that was relevant to use and got some really cool images to pop up from there. And he was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool to be able to visualize it in this way.’”
Since, the Stars have used AI-based image generators as a tenet of the brainstorming process for marketing assets like pregame video opens. That does not mean those videos qualify as AI-generated, Lovato noted, although she said some elements in the team’s “Blackout Night” promotional content during the regular season, and recently debuted playoff open, are.
Dallas Stars
“We’re using it as a tool to inspire us,” she said. The team uses Kaiber and Runway for text to photo/video purposes and Eleven Labs for voiceovers.
A more technical use case related to game presentation emerged with the upgrade of the American Airlines Center’s center LED videoboard ahead of the 2023-24 season, a reported $10M project. On the previous board, in-game video content was displayed in 1080p, while the new board required 4K resolution. The Stars used Topaz Labs’ Topaz Video AI to upscale its existing video content for LED ribbons (rather than recreating it), boiling down to a 15-to-20-minute process per 90-second asset.
“Something that could have cost us months took us weeks,” Lovato said.
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Lovato declined to comment on the precise costs incurred from the Stars marketing department’s use of AI tools other than to call it nominal, “which has allowed us to explore and experiment with several different products over the past year, which has made the cost of entry very easy,” she added.
The theme of the new playoff video open, Lovato said, centers on the idea of the extraterrestrial: “Stars, galaxies, space, with hockey organically integrated into it.” The Stars’ objectives on the game presentation side are anecdotal in nature but touch multiple departments.
“Our key goal for playoffs in particular is to have the most entertaining show in the league,” Lovato said. “Driving those ticket sales, driving people to come into the arena, getting people to talk about our show in general – and then all of that works holistically. What we’re trying to do around playoffs is going to be a whole 360 integration.”
