Sony raised European football fan engagement and boosted the profile of its Xperia smartphone brand through its UEFA Champions League 2016 sponsorship and connected BT Sport broadcast sponsorship with fan focused, supporter live match reaction video content campaign – a Googlebox style initiative called #ChampionsSofa – running primarily on Twitter.
Territory: Global
Agency: Mediacom / HeyHuman / SnappyTV / Firecracker
Objectives
Amidst the increasingly fragmented and crowded smartphone sector, Sony’s sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League (which included sponsoring the tournament coverage of official UK broadcaster BT Sport) – the most popular club competition in the football world – offered the brand an opportunity to differentiate the Xperia smartphone from other brands in the category.
The brief was to develop a creative and cost effective solution to build better connections and stronger engagement with European football fans (without spending as much on the activation budget as fellow official sponsors).
The activation set out to raise awareness of Sony’s sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League following research showing low levels of association awareness in comparison to the other top tier tournament sponsors.
So Sony sought to tap into the excitement surrounding every game by giving fans a unique social experience that had Sony Xperia mobile technology at the heart of it.
Activation
Fast, fan-focused match reaction video content sat at the heart of the leverage campaign.
Brand research found that second screen behaviour is particularly prevalent during UEFA Champions League matches and that additional match-relevant video content and real-time/low latency opinion generate the highest levels of engagement during and immediately after games.
Furthermore, it was established that the retweet potential of associated content starts to decline just five minutes after the end of a match highlight and sharing is 50% lower 25 minutes after the final whistle.
So it was decided that to capture the attention of content-hungry football fans, Sony needed to get its message out in moments, rather than the minutes, after a match highlight.
With other sponsors and rival brands producing player focused content, Sony decided to take a different approach and turn the spotlight on the fans.
Throughout UEFA Champions League games, the brand team believed that spontaneous supporter reactions to key moments – such as match-winning goals, contentious refereeing decisions and fouls and penalties – can be as entertaining as the game itself.
So Sony’s strategy was built around creating and distribute content capturing true football passion and emotion through spontaneous supporter reaction from fans at home.
The marketing team recruited five fan groups – from Germany, Spain and the UK – and, using Sony Xperia handsets, filmed them watching the match on their sofas.
The marketing team sought out passionate armchair fans and filmed them, using Xperia phones, watching their teams’ matches from their own homes: complete with celebrations, tears and even dancing pizza slices!
Multiple video feeds from a number of signal-boosted locations where fans were watching games were streamed back to the team’s newsroom in London, where the video was clipped up, edited and published assets to Sony Xperia’s social media platforms instantly.
Thus Sony captured real-time and low latency authentic fan reactions and turned these into short-form video content which was shared within the football community within moments of the action occurring.
Twitter was chosen to be the lead distribution platform for the content as this was an immediate platform and the place where a significant volume of supporter discussions were taking place.
This matchday content was managed live from an all-agency newsroom and it was also guided by real-time data analysis which helped select and target content to the fans who were talking about the game as well as to other football supporters/Twitter users who followed relevant teams, players and pundits.
By reducing the time it took to get Soy’s content live meant the marketing team utilized the company’s SnappyTV technology – which is more usually used for broadcasters to capture and then post live TV content – to allow Sony to post its fan group reactions within just four minutes.
Plus, after each match, the best moments were edited into a 30″ cut which was posted on Youtube for catch up viewing the next morning.
Sony Award Video_V3 from Peter Kaminski on Vimeo.
Outcome
In terms of results, Sony claim the activation led to a significant uplift in ‘awareness’ and ‘association’ and generated more than 6.9m views across first five games of the competition.
#ChampionsSofa was a ‘top 5’ Twitter trending topic in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and the UK and was the Number One UEFA Champions League brand in terms of Twitter mentions
Plus, Sony’s initiative saw its Xperia brand’s share of voice on Twitter increase significantly from match to match: this culminated with mentions of the brand’s Twitter handle reaching 79% in the semi-finals and 44% in the final.
In terms of other notable social media statistical results, the #ChampionsSofa activity reached 5.6 million engaged football fans on Twitter and 2.7 million on Facebook across France, Germany, Spain and the UK with content performance beating the brand’s own benchmarks.
According to Sony and its agencies, the campaign’s cost-per-view was 42% cheaper versus the industry’s channel benchmarks and the 32% completed view rate was eight times better than anticipated.
The sponsor and its marketing team also claimed that content engagement rates beat industry benchmarks by 150%.
The brand’s organic social results included a 1000% increase in organic video performance on YouTube (compared to Sony’s global channel average) and organic Facebook views reached over 1 million.
The campaign also won several advertising and marketing industry awards including The Drum’s 2017 ‘Best Use of Content on Social Platform’ award.
