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Marketing and Sponsorship

Stream Engine will value sponsorships in real time

Ed Kiernan’s biggest professional pivot is expected to happen this week with the official launch of his new company, Stream Engine.

Born out of the pandemic, which evaporated influencer marketing dollars and forced Kiernan and his three business partners — Brian Kim, Ethen Yao and Qasim Zahir — to partly sideline an influencer marketing platform called Nfluence, Stream Engine uses artificial intelligence to measure and analyze the value of sponsorships on streaming and OTT platforms.

Marketers wanted a better tool to measure their sponsorships’ success on streaming platforms, an issue highlighted by increased use during the coronavirus pivot. A Grabyo report last month said that Americans’ spending on streaming is averaging $1 billion more a month compared to January, before COVID-19’s onset.

“I didn’t set out to be a CEO of a data company at the beginning of 2020,” said Kiernan, an investor and partner in the esports agency Damage, from which Nfluence and Stream Engine sprang. “But when I saw it, I saw the missing piece of the world that I came from.”

The pivot from Nfluence and its focus on individual influencers to Stream Engine and its enterprise service required a multiday coding marathon to rework the engine’s algorithm, as well as a pitch by Yao, the chief financial officer; Kim, the chief operating officer; and Zahir, the chief technology officer, to Kiernan’s wife, Michele. Kiernan said she needed convincing that it was OK for him to quit his day job as chief commercial officer of Johnson Controls Hall of Fame Village in the midst of an economic crisis. 

Courtesy of Stream Engine

Stream Engine’s name is reminiscent of one of Kiernan’s previous successes, Engine Shop, which he co-founded in 2012 and sold in 2015. He left in 2017 to start Damage with the help of Kim, a former competitive esports player. Stream Engine, which has 13 employees and no office, combines Kiernan’s sports marketing experience with the tech and esports backgrounds of Kim, Yao and Zahir.

The new company, which still offers Nfluence, will measure the effectiveness of brand placements visually, vocally and through chat in real time. The service uses 3D motion tracking to recognize logos and brand names in moving images, crucial for sports or esports streams. Chat monitoring in at least eight languages is born of Damage’s esports background, in which commentary from viewers is commonplace and contains valuable information about brand sentiment. None of Stream Engine’s competitors offer 3D vision or chat monitoring.

Even without detailed knowledge of the service, Melinda Byerley, a founding partner of Timeshare CMO, a data-driven digital marketing consultancy, and formerly in leadership roles at PayPal and eBay, said “I’m bullish on anything that uses technology to provide more transparency to advertisers about how their money is being spent and how it’s being perceived by their users to make it more effective.”

Stream Engine monitors eight metrics in real time, giving sponsors information that they can act on almost immediately. A sponsor could learn as it happens when its logo was receiving the most positive feedback during an esports stream, for example, and display it again at similar future moments during the event. Or a streaming platform could dynamically price ad spots during a football game, depending on whether it was a tight contest or a blowout. 

Yao said that Stream Engine is in talks with Fortune 100 brands, major sports leagues and teams, global media rights holders and broadcast companies. Kiernan said Stream Engine has nearly $10 million in revenue commitments waiting for the launch, though none of them would comment. The company’s third quarter revenue growth of 400% jumped to 1,500% in the fourth.

“The response we’ve gotten is unlike anything I’ve ever gotten in my life,” Kiernan said.

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