Ahead of the start of 2022/23 Premier League (PL) season, broadcast partner BT Sport rolled out an experimental, multi-channel campaign built around fan-fuelled experiment which collected, tested and showcased supporters’ soccer beliefs and predictions by scrutinising them under scientific testing in ‘The BT Sport Believe It Lab’.
The initiative kicked off in a laboratory where neuroscientists from Imperial College London tested a group of supporters’ (drawn from all of the 20 PL clubs) footballing beliefs and discover whether the fans genuinely think their predictions will come true or whether they are merely pre-season banter. The experiment aimed to find out which players fans think are under/over rated, who’s going to excel this coming season and where their club will finish in the league table.
The agency led team then analysed each stated belief and used it to spark debate, engaging conversation and some fun amongst fans, footballing talent, BT Sport presenters and an influencer influencers (including Joleon Lescott, Rio Ferdinand, David Alorka and Rory Jennings).
Some of the questions put to the test were:
> Is Saka better than Son?
> Will Manchester United win silverware?
> Is Haaland overrated?
> Has Super Frank’s revolution really begun?
The experimental campaign, which was created by agency Saatchi & Saatchi and produced by UNIT9Films with directing due A Common Future, set out to show that the UK communications giant values fans like no-one else.
The subsequent campaign based on the experiment rolled out across multiple channels between 1 and the 12.30 kick-off of BT’s opening Premier League 2022/23 season fixture between Fulham and Liverpool on Saturday 6 August.
The campaign promoting the broadcaster’s league coverage and live match telecasts was fronted by a hero spot running across its TV and online platforms called ‘Believe It? Now See It On BT Sport’ which debuted on air from 1 August.
The lead ad was supported by a set of OOH and social content all designed to drive pre-season hype, encourage pay-TV subscriptions and sign-ups to BT Sport’s football social media channels.
Amongst the experiments, the neuroscientists used state-of-the-art functional MRI technology to analyse fans’ beliefs and these MRI scans were then used by Saatchi & Saatchi to produce a series of 20 regionalised OOH digital 48 sheets – one for each Premier League team.
At the start of the season fans believe ANYTHING is possible…
We’ve put predictions from fans of all 20 Premier League clubs to the ultimate test in our cutting-edge
laboratory! — Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) August 1, 2022
Mo Salah is the fans pick for the Premier League Player of the Season award!
Let us know your winner…
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) August 2, 2022
Mo Salah is the fans pick for the Premier League Player of the Season award!
Let us know your winner…
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) August 2, 2022
Sergio Aguero on Erling Haaland’s early taste of Premier League football… pic.twitter.com/1tGpCJEFM3
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) August 2, 2022
“When it comes to the start of the season, football fans will believe anything’s possible. There’s boasting, bragging and debating on how it will all play out,” outlined Saatchi & Saatchi Creative Director William John. “We wanted to put those beliefs to the test, to see if fans genuinely believe in their teams or if it’s all bluster.”
BT Consumer Group Director Of Marketing Communications Pete Jeavons added: “Believe It, Now See It on BT Sport taps into the emotion of football, however irrational, and will get the attention of football fans. It creates a connected campaign, born of our scientific test, from social content all the way through to digital out of home which is set to fire up debate as we near the big kick off.”
A Common Future commented: “Mixing science and a fun narrative has to be among the best jobs you can land in our business. Sorting out the MRI scans was a Herculean feat by our production team – those things are in very high demand and not exactly cheap 😉 Then figuring out how to turn the brain imagery into a metric that could work for our approach – there’s so many things you don’t think about before you deepdive into the subject matter. Like the fact that we simply can’t read minds (just yet) and therefore you have to work with statistical reductions and averaging, etc. But this is of course where the fun is: Finding out a way to make it work and then finding the best way to narrate it so people actually get it and there’s still space in the film for the fun and banter. We love the approach the team at Saatchi & Saatchi chose for this: Not to just let the science do the heavy lifting and make the film all about ‘awesome tech’, but to bring it back around to what it’s all about for football fans: the banter and the ever-important question of who’s right and who’s deluded when it comes to predictions for your team. This informed our choice of camera and shooting approach. We took inspiration from ’The Big Short’ which works a lot with crash zooms and jerky camera movements to bring an ad-hoc vibe into a controlled shoot. We wanted this spontaneous and real vibe, of the camera reacting to sudden outbursts of laughter, crash-zooming in on important details and then keeping a high-octane approach in edit. And we can proudly say: it’s all real! None of the results or reactions were staged – these were real football fans seeing their actual scientific score for the first time and then reacting to it.”
The campaign was created for clientBT Sport by a team at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi that included Chief Creative Officer Franki Goodwin, Executive Creative Director William John, Creatives Will Brookwell, Sarah Heavens and Rodrigo Castellari, Design Director Nathan Crawford, Designers Graham Puttock, Cameron Buckman, Dani Wolf, Adam Palmer and Devin Arden, Planners Ophelia Stimpson and Ciaran McManus, Business Lead Charlotte Elwig, Account Director Elliot Handler, Senior Account Manager James Graham and Agency Producers Sam Topley, Kirk Mechen, Felicity Bamber, Bill Elouahabi and Abi Wilson.
Media buying was led by Tom Kislingbury at Essence.
The production company was Unit 9 with Directors A Common Future, Executive Producer Greg Hemes, Producer Geoff Stickler, Production Manager Cath Bouverat, Production Assistants Paris Robyn Hounam and Sophie Williams, DOP Spike Morris and Production Designer Benedict Lack.
Casting was handled by Hammond Cox and editing by Whitehouse Post with Editor Joe Walton and Edit Assistant Thomas Hill.
Post-production was handled by Youngster with Post Producer Helen Stanley and Colourist Jim Bracher, while audio post-production was run by Factory with Audio Producer Beth Massey, Audio Engineer Mark Hill, Second Unit Director Connor Pearce and music supervision from Sian Rodgers at Siren.
Comment
This campaign seems based on the idea that the world of football doesn’t always make fans its top priority and explores the fine line between fandom, fantasy and self-delusion.
In terms of it outcomes, it revealed that Manchester City fans are the most confident of all PL fans with 48% very confident or confident in predicting the final league table, compared to 34% of Chelsea fans, 33% of Liverpool fans and 32% of Manchester United fans.
Indeed, 80% of City fans placed their own side top when asked to rank the final Premier League table for next season, compared to 69% of Liverpool fans, 31% of Chelsea supporters, 22% of Arsenal fans and 22% of Manchester United followers.
Other results included 77% of Newcastle United fans predicting that their side will win the title within the decade.
This campaign adds to BT Sport’s expanding heritage of innovative new PL season campaigns such as ‘2020’s ‘Unlimited Subs‘ and 2019’s ‘Script The Season‘.
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