Best Brand Activation Involving a Club 2018
Chelsea FC and Joe Wicks
In collaboration with health & fitness guru and Chelsea fan, Joe Wicks aka The Body Coach, the club hosted the first ever High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) session inside a football stadium, aptly named #HIITONTHEPITCH With DJ Marvin Humes providing the tunes, Joe led two pulsating sessions on the hallowed turf at Stamford Bridge, streamed live across Chelsea FC & Joe’s Facebook and YouTube, allowing 1200+ fitness enthusiasts to work out, with thousands more taking part online Attendees shared once-in-a-lifetime snaps on the pitch, received a branded tote bag, and even got the chance to meet Joe The unique setting and giant HIIT ON THE PITCH lettering in the goalmouth provided perfect photo opportunities, with hundreds of posts across Twitter and Instagram generating reach and driving brand heat This activation was part of a wider ‘beyond football’ marketing strategy Joe Wicks proved to be a perfect brand fit, providing an authentic voice with a highly engaged audience passionate about health & fitness The event allowed the club to start growing the appeal of the brand through a previously untapped vertical.
Watch the video: https://vimeo.com/278464294
FC Barcelona and Beko
Beko is the international home appliance brand of Arçelik Group, it offers product lines that include major appliances, air conditioners and small appliances.
The 15th of February 2018, Beko announced the extension of its sponsorship of FC Barcelona.
Our challenge was to make the world aware of the partnership extension, increasing Beko brand awareness, consideration and market share.
We discovered a worrying tension amongst our core target audience, mainly families with children, which is that childhood obesity is growing rapidly worldwide.
We leveraged a powerful insight to engineer the solution, which is the fact that children do not always listen to their parents, but they do listen to their heroes.
This is why we launched “Eat Like A Pro”, a global initiative to help parents feed their children healthy food to tackle the global epidemic growth of childhood obesity. We showed FC Barcelona players cooking healthy meals Tiki Taka style using Beko products and creating engaging content across integrated channels all aimed at helping parents feeding their children healthy food.
We then helped actively the cause by donating 1M EUR to Unicef through a stunt during the last El-Clasico. The campaign delivered astonishing results worldwide.
Leicester City FC with Adidas
Following Leicester City’s historic title-winning season in 2016, the Club has undergone a rapid period of growth, with the progression of international retail strategy one element of its long-term commercial objectives.
Echoed in summer 2018 when LCFC announced a new technical kit deal with global sportswear giant adidas, a renovation of the Club’s Fanstore was scheduled for the close-season. Leicester City would go on to dedicate significant effort and resource into creating a successful brand activation event alongside the store’s grand opening.
Working closely with external agencies and direct with adidas, Club departments went about designing a solution that brought the brand closer to the fans with a uniform, ‘street smart’ refit – all whilst staying true to Leicester City’s roots.
Coupled with various free activations outside of King Power Stadium on launch day, the store’s unveiling helped cement Leicester City’s new association with adidas while contributing to impressive sales and footfall throughout.
Manchester City FC & SAP – Momentum Worldwide
SAP created a global social media campaign to drive fan understanding of their partnership with Manchester City football club through a series of playful, stats-based videos, where the fans’ knowledge was put to the test.
‘Who’s the Blue?’ showed four Manchester City players performing a variety of football skills…all while disguised in full-body morphsuits. The only clue to each player’s identity was their stats. Fans were encouraged to guess their identity for the chance to win big.
It was one of the most successful Manchester City social campaigns. Ever. Helping generate awareness of SAP in millions of supporters.
Manchester United with #Alexis7
In the ever-growing competitive landscape of the football transfer market, there is also a need for the quick turn-around of player transfer announcements. Manchester United strives to create new and innovative ways in which to produce shareable content quickly combined with a well-orchestrated release plan across multiple digital platforms. The news of a new signing is not just a club announcement, but also a rebranding exercise in which any new signings are cemented as a Manchester United player as soon as a contract is signed. The ability to gain traction in the ever growing demand for the latest news and entertainment in the social media sphere allows the club to engage with fans and media outlets, as well as grow the club and individual player’s social media following. Overall there were 17.3m total interactions across official Manchester United social media channels on the day of the Alexis Sanchez announcement which eclipsed all other stories of the day on social media, with the official launch hashtag #Alexis7 trending at number 1 on Twitter worldwide within 15 minutes of the announcement being made. Alexis also increased his social media personal social media following by 500k+ within 24 hours of the announcement.
Norwich City FC & bidstack
Bidstack & Norwich City Football Club asked the question, does the World’s first Football Management eSport Champion have the transferable skills to take his skills from the game to the dugout, manging the Norwich City Legends team’s inaugural fixture vs. Inter Milan’s unbeaten Legends team, Inter Forever.
In an effort to promote bidstack’s newly acquired status as exclusive in-game advertising agency for Sport Interactive’s Football Manager franchise, bidstack & City partnered up in attempting to remove the virtual from virtual reality, and showcasing the power of native in-game advertising.