Shirt Logo Switch, Klopp Spot & Auction Lead Liverpool & Standard Chartered’s ‘Seeing Is Believing’ CSR Campaign

In terms of timing and activation this is an impressively committed and creative multi-platform cause campaign: with both sponsor and club giving serious rights assets, time and direct/in-direct financial support to the initiative

We particularly like the key campaign role played by and sight-relevant synergies associated with Jurgen Klopp: after all, he is not only a high profile figure, a Liverpool FC leader and club figurehead, but he is also globally well known for his own glasses (indeed, his spectacles have become something of a personal symbol and have seen him become something of an alternative style icon).

This cause campaign doesn’t just follow on from the sponsor and team’s virtual reality 360 initiative last month (see case study), but more pertinently links to the partnership’s wider ‘Global Goals’ campaign which aims to help end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice and tackle climate change by 2030.

Liverpool’s main sponsor Standard Chartered is backing the UN Global Goals campaign as a founding partner, and has partnered with the club on a series of planned activities to help raise awareness.

Indeed, Standard Chartered and LFC worked together to create a mass market content strategy: that content created was unique and designed specifically to talk to the world through football.

The campaign assets and pieces were released across multiple platform including social media, radio, print and TV to reach people right across the globe.

For example, ‘We the People’, which took place in advance of the UN Global Goals summit in September, saw LFC and SCB put forward first team captain Jordan Henderson, then manager Brendan Rodgers and LFC legend Robbie Fowler in a visual manifesto calling for change.

Other strands from the campaign included Kolo Toure participating in collaborative education project the World’s Largest Lesson,

and LFC captain Jordan Henderson, plus players Adam Lallana, Kolo Toure and Jordan Ibe discussing their favourite music on Radio Everyone (a pop-up global radio station that will highlight the unsung heroes of health and climate change),

Plus there was last year’s shirt sponsor logo swap game (against Aston Villa) that saw the bank’s name replaced by the Global Goals logo and a half-time charity fundraising game featuring club legends Robbie Fowler and Ian Rush and a live Dizzy Goals competition.

Dizzy Goals, (where participants spin around the ball and then try to score) has been a key awareness driver for Global Goals over recent weeks, supported by multiple celebrities and sports stars, including LFC’s own Jordan Ibe and Joe Gomez.

Another phase of the programme was built around an emotive video featuring fan Mekfah: an initiative that saw LFC and SCB work in collaboration to create an emotive video portraying the extent of poverty across the world.

Through SCB relationship, Mekfah was transported from the slums of Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur and was presented the opportunity to walk out with the LFC Captain ahead of the preseason tour game and his journey was captured via video and shared globally across all LFC and SCB platforms to help educate the world about the ‘Global Goals’ message.

In addition to the key activities highlighted above LFC activated their significant global PR reach to maximise the scope of the campaign, while SCB also utilised a range of their contractual rights with LFC to help raise awareness of the campaign – these included a Solus email to LFC fan database, the digital banner inventory on LFC.com, as well as LED pitchside perimeter at Anfield.

Using all of these resources, LFC and SCB were able to exceed all campaign targets.

The results included:

> Coverage across over 170 media outlets which generated potential PR exposure of 3.61 billion

> Over 4 million total video views across all Global Goals activity

> A total reach of over 37 million across LFC social media platforms

> Over 1.8 million direct engagements on posts across LFC social media outputs

> Over 2.5 million digital web impressions from banner adverts across the LFC Global website

‘As a bank, we often talk about the importance of being here for good. This is not just a brand promise, it is an ethos that we try to live by every day,’ said Sir John Peace, chairman of Standard Chartered plc, last year.

‘When we were presented with the opportunity to leverage our global network and our partnership with Liverpool Football Club to make sure that everyone knows about the Global Goals, we recognised this as an incredible opportunity to drive real change and improve the lives of people across the world.

‘We have worked closely with Liverpool in recent years with our ‘Perfect Match’ shirt swaps to support our charitable initiative Seeing is Believing, which aims to end avoidable blindness. We hope to replicate the success of this collaboration to tell everyone about the Global Goals, and we are proud to support this campaign.’

Billy Hogan, chief commercial officer at Liverpool FC, added: ‘We are proud to be supporting the Global Goals campaign alongside Standard Chartered and encouraging our supporters across the world to raise awareness of the Global Goals for sustainable development. This is such an ambitious, high-profile project and one that can have a real, tangible and positive impact on the world.

‘I believe our fans across the globe will get behind this new project and show their support and passion in their communities, just as they have previously with Standard Chartered’s ‘Seeing is Believing’ initiative over the past four years.’