Since 1998, the Doha Golf Club has been the host venue of the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters.
But now, the 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters, a European Tour event is moving to the Education City Golf Club. This will be the 23rd of the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters (since 1998) in 2020.
Between 2015 & 2019, the prize of the tournament slightly decreased from 2.5 million Euros to 1 750 000 Euros.
The event is organized by the Qatar Golf Association (QGA), the Qatar Olympic Committee (QOC), Education City Golf Club and long-term title sponsor, Commercial Bank.
The tournament is considered Qatar’s annual ‘must-attend’ sporting and social event, first held in 1998.
It is widely known for bringing together the world’s best golf talent; the likes of Sergio Garcia, Rory Mcllroy, Adam Scott, Justin Rose, Ernie Els, and Henrik Stenson have all competed in past years.
The 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters event will see Education City Golf Club support and emphasize community and family activities as it aims to encourage young Qataris to take up the sport and to grow the game of golf in Qatar.
The 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters will take place between March 5 to 8.
The 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters‘ challenges
One of the main challenges of the organizers of the 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters is how to keep the audience and fans engaged with the event.
The usage of augmented reality (see PGA Tour AR app) and virtual reality can help you to win back the attention of these people.
Just to understand the popularity of these technology solutions, I will give you interesting insights from HubSpot & Talkwalker’s Social Media Trends for 2020:
- Augmented reality and virtual reality conversations had 13.2M engagements in the first half of 2019, up 0.5% from H2 2018.
- Virtual Reality has 8.6 times the share of mentions relating to trends for 2020, compared to trends conversations in 2019. While augmented reality has 7.03 times the share.
- VR can help golf fans to pre-experience online the tournament.
- I expect that 5G will contribute to the popularity of these solutions.
I think the PGA Tour AR app‘s 360° Tee Box feature demonstrates what are the potentials of AR in fan engagement development:
After selecting the 360° Tee Box within the app, fans will be directed to scan the floor and tap to start the experience.
Once they tap to start, an AR green with the Pebble Beach flag will appear and direct fans to walk toward the green.
Once fans walk onto the virtual green, the 360° video from either the 1st or 18th tee box will appear, and they can move their phones around to view the video.
The rapid adoption of subscription video streaming services (OTT services) like Netflix (160M+ subscribers worldwide), Amazon, and Hulu (25M+ subscribers) and of social live streams on Facebook, YouTube, etc. tells me that we should take advantage of this trend.
Such services can help organizers to reach more people who otherwise won’t be able to see such tournaments like the 2020 Commercial Bank Qatar Masters.
Techcrunch found:
Almost one-third (29%) of Americans say they watch more streaming TV than linear TV, and among those age 18-29 it’s 54% (with 29% having cut the cord on linear TV entirely).
It would be also beneficial for the organizers if they could provide a reliable fast Wi-Fi connection that enables the audience to broadcast their experience via social live-streaming platforms.
We should even encourage the fans who will participate to share their experience via social live-streaming platforms (e.g. Facebook Live, YouTube Live) in addition to sharing their photos.
By utilizing these solutions the ROI of the sponsorship investment will be bigger. This will help keep such a major sponsor for the future.