I live very close to Croke Park Stadium in Dublin.
I may not follow the matches closely, but when you live near the stadium, it is almost impossible not to understand the emotions they create. You hear the roar of the crowd, see the streets filling up and feel the energy spreading through the area with every game.
So I would like to congratulate Mayo, who defeated Kerry 1-20 to 1-17 in the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final at Croke Park on 26 July 2026. The result gave Mayo their first title since 1951, ending a 75-year wait. According to the GAA’s official match report, that long wait finally ended at Croke Park.
But what does this have to do with artificial intelligence?
More than we might think.
From the emotion of sport to sponsorship data
AI Dubliners previously featured VISUA as one of the companies shaping Ireland’s AI ecosystem.
When I recently revisited the company’s work, one particular use case caught my attention: sports sponsorship measurement.
During a sports broadcast, brands can appear on shirts, pitch-side boards, equipment and different areas of a stadium. But the simple fact that a logo appears on screen does not tell the whole story.
How long the logo remains visible, where it appears on screen, how much space it occupies, how clearly it can be seen and how close it is to the action all matter.
This information provides a foundation for platforms that assess sponsorship visibility and its potential commercial value.
The frames traditional measurement can miss
A typical sports broadcast may contain 30 frames per second. A two-and-a-half-hour match can therefore contain around 270,000 individual frames.
Analysing an entire video at this scale requires considerable processing power.
According to VISUA’s own explanation, some sponsorship measurement providers analyse only one frame from every second of footage. Some systems may analyse two or three.
This is not the finding of an independent industry study. It is VISUA’s own assessment of existing measurement methods. Even so, the limitation it highlights is important.
If a logo appears and disappears between the sampled frames, part of its exposure may not be measured at all. In other cases, the amount of time it remained on screen may be overestimated or underestimated.
In one example shared by VISUA, an analysis based on one frame per second measured a brand’s exposure as one second. When all 30 frames were examined, the actual duration was found to be 1.73 seconds.
The difference may appear small in a single clip. Across hundreds of matches and millions of brand appearances, however, it can become far more significant.
How does VISUA analyse every frame?
VISUA’s Visual-AI technology can process sports footage at full frame rate. In other words, when a project requires it, the system can analyse each frame of a video individually.
The data provided by the company can include:
- The length of time a logo remains on screen
- The size and position of the logo within the frame
- The clarity and prominence of the exposure
- The surface on which the logo appears, such as a shirt, advertising board or piece of equipment
- Screenshots and short video clips supporting each detection
VISUA says full-frame-rate analysis allows brand exposure to be measured down to the millisecond, with results delivered within hours when required.
There is an important distinction here. VISUA does not claim to calculate the final monetary value of a sponsorship directly. Instead, it provides raw and structured data about logo exposure. Sponsorship measurement platforms can then combine this information with their own valuation models, audience research and other commercial indicators.
Vision Insights and the Decoder platform
One company using this technology is Vision Insights.
As part of the partnership between VISUA and Vision Insights, VISUA’s Sports Sponsorship Monitoring technology was integrated into the Decoder platform.
Decoder brings brand exposure data from sports footage together with fan research and other sponsorship indicators. This allows teams, sponsors, agencies and rights holders to examine not only whether a brand appeared, but also the conditions in which that exposure took place.
VISUA’s work extends beyond sport
Sports sponsorship is only one application of VISUA’s Visual-AI technology.
The company’s computer vision technologies include:
- Logo and mark detection
- Object and scene detection
- Visual text detection
- Visual search
- Hologram authentication
These technologies can support applications ranging from phishing and counterfeit detection to brand protection and content moderation.
AI does not create the emotion, but it can measure the value around it
This is where I think VISUA’s work in sport becomes especially interesting.
Artificial intelligence does not create the joy, anticipation or disappointment inside a stadium. Those emotions still belong to people.
But technology can now measure the brand visibility surrounding these deeply human moments and provide some of the data used to determine its commercial value.
The sound rising from Croke Park still belongs to the supporters. AI, meanwhile, is analysing the visibility on screen, frame by frame.
Whether we notice it or not, technology is increasingly working alongside some of life’s most human experiences.
At AI Dubliners, we will continue following and highlighting companies developing practical AI solutions to real problems across Ireland.
