The role of content automation

by Tom McDonnell, Co-founder & CEO,
May 2023

We’re in an age of increasingly lean teams. A small number of people expected to produce a lot of output.

Nobody has felt this pressure more than content teams. And especially in sports and entertainment where maintaining the attention of fans is an always-on quest.

We believe teams should have choice – choice in what they invest their time in creating versus what they source via automoted or less labour-intensive means. For example:

Data Feeds: generate commentary, predictions and other game or player related content
Set and forget: automatically publish everything the feed generates such as goals and substitutions
Curation & manual publishing: allow the feed to suggest content, which you then review and publish on the fly
AI generated content: Ask AI to suggest content for polls and trivia with Content Helper
AI powered translation: Have content produced in multiple languages at the touch of a button

The Interaction Cloud has the ability to combine content and data automation from feeds with the ability to modify, curate and publish content.

You can opt to set and forget, leaving a data feed to run commentary automatically. Or you can have the feed inject content into Studio and then manually curate it – publishing only what you want. You can even edit data driven events and put your own spin on them.

Another option is to augment what is automated with human created content. For example, Liverpool FC, use a blend of Opta , generator, commentary, data, and editor created content in their Match Centre. This takes the pressure off them to publish every event, giving them more bandwidth to craft commentary to make an impact.

Open inputs and being feed agnostic

The platform has a technically open interface via its Control API. Almost anybody can inject content into their projects using either low code (Node, Python) or no-code tools like Zapier. You can even use Google Sheets to inject content.

Rather than support and maintain every feed and every sport out of the box, we focus on making it very easy to connect existing feeds to the platform. This ensures a closer fit with whatever data is available, and to what the use case is, without constraint.

Some of the feeds our customers commonly integrate include:

StatsPerform / Opta
SportRadar
PA
Custom In-House Feeds: FIFA, Formula E

Other and types sources of automation

With an open interface, it’s relatively easy to plug in content sources. For example:

Headless CMS such as Contentful
Video content from Online Video Platforms like Brightcove
Generative AI like Midjourney
Graphics tools like StatsPerform PressBox

Key Takeaways

The importance of choice - we believe any platform should give content teams the option to automate as much or as little as they want. Monterosa / Interaction Cloud is designed to give users the option of automating a range of tasks, taking the pressure off busy teams
Being feed agnostic - we focus on making connecting existing feeds to the platform as easy as possible, so you can continue using your feed of choice
Control API - our Control API enables our customers to inhect content into the platform via low or no code tools. You can even do this using Google Sheets!