A new football campaign for the upcoming season sees BT Sport promote itself as broader, more complete competitor to Sky Sports for UK soccer supporters with creative blending four core competitions: Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup and Europa League.
This initiative marks the first time BT has combined its tournament rights into a single campaign as it aims to switch its position from an ‘add on’ to a ‘must have’.
The creative executions consist of composite visuals combining player and game imagery and video from the four properties and all carry the copyline: ‘Four competitions, one venue’.
The assets, which make it appear that all four competitions are happening simultaneously, feature stars such as Jamie Vardy, Gareth Bale, Cristiano Ronaldo, Dimitri Payet and Wayne Rooney.
The campaign, developed in harness with Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, rolls out Monday, 1 August ahead of the 13 August Premiership kick off.
Led by a central spot,
executions are running across Video On Demand, radio, outdoor, press, online display pieces and social.
The AMV BBDO team was led by creatives Caio Giannella, Diego de Oliveira and Rachel Le Feuvre, while the work was directed by Luc Janin for production company Pulse.
Media is being run by Maxus.
Sky Sports may have around triple the number of Premier League live matches, but BT Sport is claiming to offer a more comprehensive football coverage (including 42 Premier League games, 350 European matches and 25 FA Cup games).
‘Our previous Sport marketing has tended to focus on one of those four,’ said BT consumer marketing director Dan Ramsay
‘This year, for the first time we’re focusing on the breadth of the content we’ve got.’
Ramsay argues that, following on from Leicester City’s title victory last season, there was ‘freshness and newness’ around the start of this new season and fans of all clubs are onmce again full of hope, possibility and dreams.
‘One of the things we’ve done more than ever before is personalisation,’ epxlains Ramsay.
‘We’ve made social content specifically for each of the Premier League clubs, so we can target fans of each of those clubs.’
Comment
The BT campaign is a riposte to Sky’s own David Beckham fronted football campaign which launched a week earlier and also plays on similar ‘It Could Happen’ themes (see case study).
The UK battle for pay football broadcasting is truly intensifying.
BT claims to have always seen itself as able to go head-to-head with Sky and now with this campaign the company is betting that customers will also see it as a maturing, heavy hitting brand in the football tv space.
One would hope so too, after all, BT is investing £960m over three years in Premier League rights at £7.62m per game (which compares to Sky’s £4.18bn for its 126 games a year).
There is certainly something of a difference between the distinctly bling, boastful and big club, big name player focus of last year’s BT ‘House Party’ campaign (see case study) and the new 2016/17 season work’s focus on all fans and mid table teams.
Links
BT Sport YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/BTSportOfficial
BT Sport Twitter:
BT Sport Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/btsport/
BT Sport Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/btsport
BT Sport Googe +:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/+BTSport/videos
BT Sport Web:
AMV BBDO:
