AI, Apps and All-Stars: A Digital Ecosystem Connecting Athletes and Brands at Cannes
Services
Product strategy
Mobile development
Digital visual identity
UI/UX
Audience research
Front-end and back-end engineering
AI strategy and implementation
Stagwell's inaugural Sport Beach (2023) earned widespread positive recognition — a first-of-its-kind event on-site at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. It featured curated innovation and marketing panels celebrating the intersection of sports, technology, and culture. Stagwell, a leading global marketing and communications group, aimed to double down in 2024, elevating the flagship summer event at Cannes with more original programming, activations and a star-studded lineup of world-class athletes and marketers, including Megan Rapinoe, Travis and Jason Kelce, Alexis Ohanian, Tammy Henault and more than 100+ renowned marketing leaders.
While the in-person event was gaining momentum, Stagwell needed to ensure its digital ecosystem across web and app were as premium and dynamic as the event itself. Stagwell tapped Code and Theory for a comprehensive digital transformation, designing and engineering an all-new Sport Beach website and app. In less than five months, Code and Theory created an entire Sport Beach ecosystem to support event marketing, attendance, engagement, and immersion — all while embodying Sport Beach’s spirit of play.
Impact
- 89% User registration completion rate (+50% over the industry average)
- 30M Impressions from press in People Magazine, Ad Age, Adweek, Digiday, Page Six and more
- Both the app and website were designed, engineered and launched in less than five months
Designed for Speed and Play
Inspired by the visual ID from 72andSunny (another Stagwell agency) and incorporating Material Design principles, we crafted a fully bespoke digital experience for Sport Beach. Our web approach was iterative, building pages and functional components that resulted in a scalable experience that gave Stagwell full creative and operational control for not only this event, but future event iterations too.
We designed the Sport Beach app to deliver the beauty of Cannes' beaches with the ease of scheduling and information at our user’s fingertips. The app’s main objective was making scheduling clear, compelling and fast. We leveled up the experience by giving users the ability to build their itineraries manually or through our AI Assistant in less than three taps.
AI That Anticipates User Needs
The app's cornerstone was an AI Assistant that could answer a myriad of questions about the event (from how to access the beach to event schedules to best local restaurant picks) and tailor event recommendations to each user based on their interests. Using Stagwell's Enterprise ChatGPT as a backbone large language model, we fine-tuned our AI on a large, static dataset about Cannes and Sport Beach. We leveraged Sanity, our CMS for the event, to constantly update changing events or critical event information.
While the AI Assistant interfaced with the CMS to update its context, it also interfaced with an event recommendation engine developed in-house and hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, taking advantage of Code and Theory's partnership with Oracle. The AI Assistant "got to meet" each user during a conversational onboarding interview, and saved those learnings to suggest customized itineraries, ensuring attendees wouldn't miss relevant content. As that content shifted (speaker changes and event schedules moving), the recommendation engine and the AI Assistant could rely on their connection to the CMS to ensure their responses were explicit, accurate, and based on real-time feedback.
Powering Rapid Innovation
Code and Theory leveraged Sanity's Content Cloud to manage all event content, including sessions, speakers, event details and more. The combination of Sanity as a content provider and Vercel as a hosting platform enabled Code and Theory to rapidly build a recommendation engine and AI chat, significantly accelerating development and reducing delivery time. This approach allowed real-time data integration and scalable solutions, feeding first—and third-party data dynamically to the AI chat system.
The Technology Powering SPORT BEACH
There's no sign of slowing down for Sport Beach, which earned more than 30M impressions from the press in publications ranging from People Magazine to Adweek and Ad Age. By building the digital ecosystem to scale for future events, Stagwell is primed and ready for Cannes 2025.
