The iconic rugby union club is galvanizing its supporter base and demonstrating sponsorship ROI by centralizing, auto-indexing and sharing its media assets.

Stade Toulousain Overview

Founded in 1907, Stade Toulousain - also known as Toulouse - is one of France’s most famous rugby clubs and the most successful in Europe. The “Red and Blacks” won the Heineken Cup/European Rugby Champions Cup a record five times, most recently in 2021. They’re also record-beaters in the French domestic Top 14 competition, where they have won an incredible 21 Boucliers de Brennus (Brennus Shields). Their scrum-half Antoine Dupont was named the best player of 2021 by World Rugby. Toulouse is known for being a main feeder for the French national team, and its youth academy is recognized as one of the best in the world.

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Challenge & Context

Stade Toulousain has a rich and celebrated history. The club is constantly accumulating new content as it documents its games, training sessions and off-field events. Being able to quickly share highlights with its legion of fans through official team and player social media channels, is key to engaging with supporters and sponsors throughout the season.

In 2020, Toulouse began its search for a Media Asset Management (MAM) solution to address its most pressing need: a centralized platform on which to store and sort tens of thousands of photos. Internal departments, players, sponsors and the press had to be able to access the platform from anywhere to immediately find, download and share the content they needed.

This translated into a requirement for an AI-powered, cloud-based Media Hub for content indexing and storing, with auto-detection, a user-friendly, customizable interface and the ability to showcase and share specific media assets.

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Moments Lab Solution

Stade Toulousain chose Moments Lab (ex Newsbridge) in 2021 and its Media Hub was deployed with large-scale indexing via Multimodal AI including:

• Logo detection,
• Face detection.

The AI was trained to recognize a dataset of club players and staff and sponsor logos, enabling media assets to be automatically indexed and sorted into dedicated “Collections” upon upload (be it live/in real-time, or manually after a game). The automation removes the need for any manual indexing, and means media hub users can immediately see and access the content collection that’s relevant to them.

Moments Lab Mobile App for iPhone and Android is used by players who, thanks to facial recognition, can access their personalized Collection of photos in the Media Hub. They can download or share their content directly to social media from the app. The Media Hub is also accessible through a customized connector on the Stade Toulousain website.

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Philippe Petitpont, Moments Lab Co-Founder & CEO commented:

“It’s really exciting to see how Stade Toulousain is using its Media Hub as a tool to harness the digital influence of its players, and engage with its partners, to demonstrate real value. Giving club sponsors the ability to quickly see and download on and off-field moments where their brand logo is on full display, means they can share the content on their own channels, and use it to help them measure ROI.”

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Vincent Bonnet, Marketing & Communications Director at Stade Toulousain said:

"With Moments Lab we can centralize and share our media assets very easily, because it indexes and sorts content automatically. Players, internal departments, partners or the press can directly access the media that’s relevant to them via a web browser or the app. The platform is easy to use. We save a lot of precious time, and we’re now looking to use additional features like live photo ingest.”

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Stade Toulousain’s Media Hub - How It Works

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Currently, after a match or club event, photographers upload files to Stade Toulousain’s Moments Lab Media Hub in S3 or FTP mode via an SD card, however this can also be automated to happen in real time and is a logical next step for the club. The media assets are auto-indexed using Multimodal AI to detect player faces and sponsor logos. Based on this tagging, Collections - pre-existing smart folders - are enriched with the latest content.

Players, internal departments, sponsors and the press access their relevant Media Hub Collections by logging in directly via Stade Toulousain’s website home page. They can also connect and immediately share assets to social media via Moments Lab mobile app.

Users can easily call for assistance through an ‘intercom’ live chat support feature in the media hub.

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Stade Toulousain x Moments Lab by the numbers

• 89 users, including club sponsors, internal marketing, partnership, digital departments and individual players.
• 16,820 photos uploaded as of June 2022.
• Moments Lab Multimodal AI trained to detect 10 - 20 sponsor logos.
• Facial recognition of 77 players and staff members.

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About Moments Lab

Moments Lab (ex Newsbridge) is a cloud media hub platform for live & archived content.

Powered by Multimodal Indexing AI and a data driven indexing approach, Moments Lab provides unprecedented access to content by automatically detecting faces, objects, logos, written texts, audio transcripts and semantic context.

Whether it be for managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetization – the solution allows for smart & efficient media asset management.

Today our platform is used by worldwide TV Channels, Press Agencies, Major Sports Federations, Production Houses, Journalists, Editors and Documentalists to boost their production workflow and media ROI.