Nielsen Sports SA has launched SIYA, an AI platform that answers questions about South African sports fans in minutes, The Media Online reported.
SIYA stands for Sponsorship Intelligence Yielding Answers. It gives users access to more than 150 million sports fan data points through questions typed in plain language.
“The insight already existed, but it was locked behind time and specialists,” said Tumelo Selikane, managing director of Nielsen Sports SA.
He said brands, broadcasters and rights holders used to commission a study or wait for an analyst. That could take days.
The platform is aimed at brands, broadcasters, rights holders and agencies. They can now search Nielsen’s existing fan research themselves when they need an answer.
Nielsen said SIYA does not create statistics. It pulls figures from the company’s own verified survey data using controlled queries.
“SIYA does not generate numbers; it retrieves them,” Selikane said. “Every figure comes from a governed query against our actual Nielsen Sports SA survey data.”
The tool follows the same rules an analyst would. It only counts people who were actually asked a question, and it shows whether figures are weighted or not.
Selikane said that when a question falls outside what the research supports, SIYA says so instead of guessing.
Nielsen is also adding support for South Africa’s official languages in phases. Selikane said the hard part is making sure a statistic and its caveats survive translation.
Early users include sponsorship agencies, broadcasters, a global sports league and a large technology platform. Brands in education and fast-moving consumer goods have also used it.
According to the report, users have asked what fans drink, whether they bet and which platforms they watch on. Some asked which sponsors fans already link to certain teams.
“When an answer takes days, you only ask the big, pre-planned questions,” Selikane said. “When it takes a minute, you can test an idea in the room.”
Nielsen built SIYA in-house over the past year. Selikane said this gave the company control over accuracy and over client and respondent data.
“An off-the-shelf assistant is very good at sounding confident, including when it is wrong,” he said.
The company said SIYA will not replace its analysts. Users can pass harder questions to Nielsen’s research specialists, who will keep doing custom and strategic work.
Selikane said one fan might follow a team on TV, a stream, social media clips and at the stadium in the same week. He said SIYA is meant to show that fan across all those platforms at once.
Nielsen plans to add verified sponsorship news, deal announcements and other in-house research to the platform. Later, it expects to include travel and tourism data on how sports fans travel and where they stay.
Source: this article is based on reporting by The Media Online. Image: The Media Online. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Sports desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Tiyani Mathebula writes about sport for Tzaneen Voice. Tiyani covers Bafana Bafana, the Springboks, the Proteas and the PSL, along with athletics, tennis and local club sport. Match reports and previews focus on results, team news, fixtures and what each game means for South African teams and fans.