Best Club Marketing Initiative – Premier League
Aston Villa FC
After a key moment in women’s sport in summer 2022, Aston Villa Football Club wanted to continue the positive conversation that had started breaking down barriers to support and participation in women’s football.
Having conducted an extensive piece of research with local young people, it was clear that negative perceptions still exist – with accessibility to ‘safe spaces’ and visibility of other women in sport being key challenges to growing the game.
To tackle these, the club created the #BeTheInspiration campaign – highlighting the unconscious bias that still exists but also the positivity of the growth of the game at all levels. From amateur local kick abouts, to elite performances, to supporting your team, we wanted to create a digital safe space where young women could inspire others and create a community.
With great results across impressions, video views and engagements the campaign inspired hundreds of young women to join our UGC wall using the hashtag, in turn inspiring others and helping to grow the women’s game.
Chelsea FC
During the January transfer window Chelsea set out to control the narrative around their transfers, build the profiles of their players and disrupt the market and the ‘normal’ way of doing things.
Leading with premium imagery and raw, BTS video that brough out the personalities of the players and landed our brand, The Pride of London, proved extremely successful. Across our 8 signings we owned the story, the narrative and led with content that was both widely shared and revered.
With over 344M people reached, 50+ third party publications sharing our content, and 185M video views we had our most sucessful transfer window and set the new standard in how elite football clubs announce the arrival of new players.
Everton FC – – 12 Days of Christmas
’12 Days of Christmas’ was launched by Everton in December 2022 during the World Cup break as a method to engage with current fans, while also aiming to attract new supporters from a wider, peripheral audience.
Money-can’t-buy and exclusive prizes were on offer from both the Club and its commercial partners, including hummel, Stake, Christopher Ward, Sportsbreaks.com, BOXT, Davanti Tyres and Marc Darcy.
These prizes included a tour of the site of the Club’s new stadium being built on the banks of the River Mersey, hospitality for a Premier League fixture at Goodison Park, and Premier League home and away match tickets.
The engaging campaign went beyond Everton’s planned objectives and overachieved in every area as it spread Christmas cheer and drove an uplift in entries, shares, views and new data compared to the previous year’s festive initiative.
Liverpool FC
Mohamed Salah’s new contract was a hot topic heading into the summer of 2022. The LFC media team worked with the player to capture the announcement at his holiday home in Mykonos and release it without a single murmur of it happening in the press or online. They built up to the announcement by working with Salah and his agent to post a number of cryptic messages on social media throughout the day to confuse supporters and press alike before finally dropping the news fans had been waiting for: he had signed a new long-term deal with Liverpool. All content was captured on location in Mykonos and released the same day, meaning a short turnaround time for those on the shoot; however, the plan and execution worked to perfection, first creating mass confusion before making the surprise announcement.
Palace for Life Foundation & Crystal Palace FC / Made in South London Campaign
Palace for Life Foundation is the official charity of Premier League club Crystal Palace F.C.
Our campaign, Made in South London, was designed to resonate with those in our community, and tighten the connection between the club, charity and the people around us… and crucially, help secure £1m in donations over 3 years to help us reach thousands more young South Londoners in need.
Palace’s internal media team collaborated with Palace fan Ben Bailey Smith (aka Doc Brown), a multi-talented creative. Ben wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a short film where he strolled the streets of south London, running into familiar Palace first-team players in unfamiliar roles, including star player Wilfried Zaha (the driver), Marc Guehi (the lollipop man), Eberechi Eze (the barber), Joel Ward (the fruit seller) and club manager Patrick Vieira, en route to Selhurst Park. Hollywood actor Chiwetel Ejiofor even joins for a video message, and boxer Richard Riakporhe is sucker-punched by a kid.
Since launch, the campaign has generated £300k enabling Palace for Life to work with 898 more youngsters than the year before.
Southampton FC – Season in Numbers
Southampton Football Club is a professional football club that plays in the Premier League.
Consumers see thousands of marketing messages and adverts every day, posing a problem for us as marketers – how can we reach and engage with our audience in a memorable way. Our annual Season in Numbers campaign places our fan’s journey of the season at the forefront – making for emotive messaging throughout.
The campaign is a personalised and interactive review of the season based on our fan’s engagement with the club.
One of the challenges we had was how do we build on an existing campaign to make it more memorable for fans. The other was how to make our fans feel valued and drive emotional engagement amongst our most loyal supporters.
Initially, our first Season in Numbers campaign took the format of a simple email report, but we knew we needed to take it to the next level if we wanted to surprise and create bragging rights for our fans.
Now, our Season In Numbers campaign takes nearly 30,000 fan’s data into a bespoke algorithm and compiles a list of metrics, which we then use to create a completely personalised video highlighting their season.
