After 18 months of testing, combat sports power UFC has signed a three-year deal to use 4D Sight’s technology to digitally swap lucrative advertising logos onto the surface of its Octagon fighting arenas during bouts.

The technology has two crucial useful components: 1) it expands UFC’s potential universe of brands for one of its most valuable ad types while selling into more than 170 territories, and 2) it allows UFC broadcasts to comply with country-by-country restrictions on advertising for sectors such as gambling, alcohol, or tobacco.

“It changes the way you think about your fundamental (ad sales) structure,” said UFC SVP, Research and Development Alon Cohen. The UFC’s “baseline (logo ad) contract is for a global brand. But there are many, many brands that want, say, North America, or Europe only.”

The new technology will allow UFC to segment those logo sales by territory, unlocking all those regional advertisers who don’t want or need to reach the entire planet.

The technology itself marks a very different approach from those used in sports with more static backdrops, such as soccer or baseball, Cohen said.

Those typically have used simpler technologies for several years that overlay an image over a green-screen backdrop or even an LED sign. Those “upstream” approaches rely on cameras locked on tripods, with a linked sensor attached. And they largely don’t have to deal with people moving into and around the screen, said Cohen.

“Achieving a similar look for our sport is so much harder,” said Cohen. “This is not the same. It is not.”

It’s particularly important when a global league such as UFC tries to comply with differing rules in seemingly every country.

“For sports that have restricted ban (ad) categories, it's an urgent problem,” said 4D Sight CEO Erhan Ciris. Ciris is based in New York City, with much of his team based in Turkey.

In the UFC’s Octagon, its name for the eight-sided arena where matches unfold, handheld cameras are shooting from each of the eight sides. Adding still more weight to the handheld camera will only make them heavier and shakier, Cohen said.

As well, the Octagon itself features two fighters, moving constantly, and a referee, all closely surrounded by the audience and support staff just outside the Octagon’s walls. It’s a nightmare for traditional upstream insertion technologies.

“We're piling hard thing on top of hard thing on top of hard thing,” Cohen said. “4D Sight had the wherewithal to get it done in real life.”

The 4D Sight approach instead relies on inserting the logo “downstream,” after the image has been captured into a video stream. 4D Sight’s tech then inserts the logo in real time, where it’s supposed to be in the image, regardless of the camera feeding the stream at that point.

Ciris said it’s an approach that reflects 4D Sight’s esports roots and early customers (Riot Games is an early investor). In video games, there are no physical “cameras,”just a digital video stream outputting to the screen amid often furious, fast-moving action.

Technology needs to be able to seamlessly “do placement and replacement” in live feeds, in the moment, Ciris said.

“Taking something out is much easier,” Ciris said. “For UFC, there is no hardware, no staff on the ground (having to perform the changes). (The brands) look at it as compliance.”

The technology ultimately helps UFC more fully take advantage of the ad-selling opportunities the Octagon can provide, where a brand would be on full or nearly full view for much of each bout for UFC’s millions of fans.

For now, the company will segment ad sales by territory, Cohen said, with possible localization tweaks such as, say, a Dutch-language logo for a Jose Cuervo ad in the Netherlands versus a Spanish-language one in Latin America.

“Climbing the mountain to even get to this point is huge for us,” Cohen said. “It matches the way we think about the world. Here's a new technology that enables a way of selling that already exists. This technology means you can now open up your regional or geo-targeted sales as full-fledged channels. The asset that's easiest to understand is a logo on the canvas. That should offer a substantial market opportunity.”

For now, UFC has only just begun showing advertisers what’s possible, but expects to begin incorporating the ads soon into its live broadcasts, Cohen said.

“It’s going to be invisible if it’s done right,” Cohen said.

Future uses could be even more sophisticated, like logos that change during a broadcast to signal a new prop bet available through an advertiser’s sports gambling app, for instance.

And ultimately, personalized ad targeting like what you routinely see on a connected TV video stream could come to the Octagon’s canvas. Ciris said the company has already done a pilot project for a client that does “personalization down to the person.”

4D Sight also can insert volumetric characters into video games, which it’s done for esports leagues such as Call of Duty, Ciris said. That could even be done with the Octagon, though UFC doesn’t need that.

“Does there exist a future where it enables an entirely different and more granular type of targeting?” Cohen said. “We think that's coming, but it may not be coming as quickly as you think.”

UFC owner Endeavor last month closed a deal with wrestling power WWE to create TKO Group Holdings, a standalone combat sports company that includes both WWE and UFC. Endeavor retains 51% of the new company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘TKO.”