Jobsite Indeedactivated its Eintracht Frankfurt shirt sponsorship in order to bring to life its ‘put people to work’ mission through multiple initiatives including ‘Job Of The Match’ & ‘Job Of the Fan’ which introduced supporters to behind-the-scenes jobs within the football club and then also introduced players to fans’ jobs.
The jobs search engine’s partnership with the Bundesliga club was part of its strategy to become part of German culture and community through job-based storytelling that related to the team and through practical job seeking utilities for Eintracht supporters, football fans and businesses across Germany.
Territory: Germany
Agency: H+K Strategies / Mediacom
Objectives
Indeed.com, the world’s largest jobsite, set out to bring its mission to ‘put people to work’ to life in the world’s leading economies, but found that Germany (one of its priority markets) offered a particular challenge.
To compete against market leading local competitor StepStone and to bring more meaning and relevance to its own brand name (which doesn’t literally mean anything in the German language), Indeed decided it needed to take a different approach to its marketing compared to that it employed in other countries.
One which would make Indeed part of German culture and which would engage and convert more of its 25 to 54-year-old core target group than its previous advertising had achieved.
The company’s solution was to sign a three-year shirt sponsorship with German Bundesliga side Eintracht Frankfurt.
It’s objective for this deal was to boost consideration (+38 per cent) through rights-based exposure and storytelling campaigns built around Germany’s favourite pastime – football.
Indeed’s activation programme was informed by an extensive phase of research.
The combined Indeed/Mediacom team worked with stakeholders across Indeed’s business to understand how the football club partnership could grow the brand and its business.
Using proprietary and non-proprietary tools ((eg TGI, Euromonitor, Foresight Factory) and both quantitative and qualitative techniques, the researchers set out to understand the competitor set and answer key questions to help identify, negotiate and execute the partnership and inform the activation strategy.
The research found the following facts and insights:
- Football the biggest passion point for Germans
- The Bundesliga engages 70 per cent of the German public
- Football fans in Germany are highly engaged with Bundesliga with 75 per cent actively engaged with league/team content outside of match days.
- German football fans are 36 per cent more likely to consider and have a favourable opinion of a brand that sponsors a football property
- 2,400,000 German football fans are looking to change jobs over the next 12 months
- 480,000 Eintracht Frankfurt fans will graduate in the next 12 months
- Frankfurt was the biggest business hub in the country with more than 50,000 businesses and a GDP of over €235bn.
- Eintracht Frankfurt has the largest business hospitality sector in the Bundesliga with 3,300 annual guests from 2,300 businesses
These insights led to the identification of Eintracht Frankfurt as the right Indeed club partner and they also feed into the rights negotiation.
Indeed created a set of SMART objectives:
- Drive higher levels of return by re-allocating €5m into a sponsorship from traditional media.
- Achieve €10m in media value from national exposure.
- Increase monthly traffic to indeed.com by 15 per cent (2 per cent growth in previous 12 months) Sign up 4,000 new clients (mid to large-size businesses) between September 2017 and June 2018 (previous year 2,900)
- Increase overall revenue by 25 per cent (previous YOY growth was 13 per cent)
- Use storytelling to shift brand consideration from 22 per cent to 38 per cent.
- Raise unaided awareness among the public from 20 per cent to 35 per cent
- Leverage storytelling and club’s owned channels to elevate engagement around indeed content from 4 per cent to 15 per cent
- Energize workforce to enhance job satisfaction and pride.
- Help achieve the annual employee satisfaction target of 85 per cent.
The research phase also showed that a significant number of football fans only watch highlights, so Indeed partnered with Sky to own the footage of the best performances of the round under ‘Career Building Moments’ theme.
This supplement provided a broader reach and impacted earned media.
Activation
To meet the aim of making Indeed part of German culture, the activation strategy was built around the idea of directly involving German players and fans in the creative: both in the stadium and in the creative process and content.
Indeed began by building a dedicated site at https://indeed-eintracht.de/ providing useful career tips and creating ‘career building moments’ broadcast supplement around highlights.
A second stage saw Indeed create ‘Indeed Job Fairs’: a series of events enabling thousands of fans/people to meet local employers and learn important career building skills.
Then, at the start of the 2017/18 season, it launched its core activation programme in the form of the season long ‘Indeed Job of the Match’ campaign: which gave fans behind the scenes insights into various jobs at the club itself.
‘Job of the Match’ aimed to demonstrates that the Bundesliga club is much more than just players and a manager, but also a stadium announcer, a chef, a kit manager and a groundsman and that all these Eintracht jobs are staffed with experienced professionals.
The campaign highlighted 10 jobs over the course of the season and invited one Eintracht fan per job to accompany each Eintracht employee for a day and then the brand turned that day into a video.
Each week, the ‘Indeed Job of the Match’ was announced on social media (via Indeed and Eintracht channels) and promoted through a pair of videos (one two-minute and one 30-second version per job).
These were supported by blog posts and additional social media content.
For the second 2018/19 season, Indeed built of the previous campaign by introducing ‘Job Of The Fan’.
This simply reversed the previous idea and saw an Eintracht employee visiting a supporters for a day to learn about the fan’s job.
Fans applied to be w weekly campaign star on the Indeed club microsite and the marketing team chose the entrant with the most interesting job.
The first week of ‘Job of the Fan’ saw Eintracht and Dutch national player Jonathan De Guzman visit fan Marcus Brinkmann who is a team leader with the Frankfurt fire department.
The experience was filmed and the resulting content was broken down into various long and short form videos across dedicated social channels.
The first episode alone achieved an organic reach of more than 200,000, average engagement rate across all social media channels of more than 3 per cent and almost 2,000 interactions.
A further activation strand saw Indeed respond to internal research of its own employees which found that while they liked the company, they didn’t feel it had a strong sense of culture.
So an employee phase of the shirt deal activation began with a staff launch event, a series of player and club executive visits to Indeed’s offices, plus match ticket competitions and complimentary personalized team merchandise.
This, according to Indeed, led to its highest level of employee satisfaction and reduction in churn.
Another notable initiative saw Indeed donate its on-shirt logo space to the fan-led diversity and respect initiative ‘United Colours of Frankfurt for games against Bayern Munich and TSG Hoffenheim.
A PR-led initaitive aimed at connecting Indeed to Frankfurt’s community and fans all over Germany and at bringing to life Indeed’s own company commitment to promoting diversity and reinforcing its belief that diversity is a key factor in maintaining an efficient and inspiring work force.
Lerevarging the fact that once a season the Bundesliga allows club’s to switch their shirt sponsor logo.
Some sponsors use this as an opportunity to showcase a sub-brand or a new product, but gave away its jersey logo space to the fan cause organization and the shirt carried the ‘United Colors of Frankfurt – Eintracht (Unity) thrives on diversity’ logo for the games.
As well as the kit logo, the Indeed/agency team also produced a social video series which gathered opinions and insights into the topic of diversity from various perspectives, all related to Indeed’s sponsorship of Eintracht.
Indeed’s Eintracht Frankfurt activation was researched by MediaCom Sport & Entertainment and produced and PR’d by H+K Sport and Entertainment.
Outcome / Results
Overall, the partnership achieved:
- Record unaided awareness among the target audience 53 per cent (target 35 per cent from 20 per cent)
- Media value delivered €20.2m (the target was €10m)
- New corporate clients 6,300 (previous year 2,900 and target of 4,000)
- Brand consideration at 58 per cent (target 38 per cent from 22 per cent)
- Increased traffic to indeed.com (average over the season) of 24 per cent (target 15 per cent)
- Engagement around Indeed content averaged 34 per cent (target of 15 per cent)
- Employee satisfaction and pride reached record level of 92 per cent
The five day ‘United Colors of Frankfurt’ initiative content notched up more than 2,200 social likes and generated more than 100,000 views with 2,000-plus views on Indeed’s social media channels and 1,000 views on the sponsorship blog.
