Medibank’s Australian Open #WePlay content-led initiative revolved around the creative idea of having a cast of kids replay each day’s major and memorable moments from the tournament.
The health insurer basically rebuilt a set of the centre court and created 32 kids costumes (based on what the tournament’s main stars will wear) in order to re-enact the day’s main events – from spectacular ‘between the legs shots, or a ball-boy incidents.
Medibank’s activation team analyses both mainstream and social media (presumably with the help of fellow partner IBM’s ‘Social Leaderboard’) in order to identify the key moments to recreate and then scripts and produces the plays in as close to real-time as possible.
Medibank ran its recreated footage across its own channels – spearheaded by its own branded content magazine platform ‘Be’ and supported across its usual social media channels (including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram) to ensure Medibank has direct and unfiltered access to the audience.
The recreated clips are then shared in as close to real-time as possible and included:
Murray,
Novak,
Nadal,
Sharapova,
and Azarenka.
The idea, part of its ongoing ‘Generation Better’ work, is to have fun and remind Australians that anyone can have a hit.
Thus the campaign also again extended its umbrella #GenBetter hashtag – which was the second most popular tournament related hashtag at last year’s tournament behind the official Australian Open one.
Medibank content marketing manager William Falkingham said that the campaign aimed to link its sponsorships of professional tennis at the Australian Open to its junior tennis work (as well as generally enhancing and encouraging active health).
‘We’ve built up our own channel through social and through ‘Be’ where we have an audience that is interested in our content, so we just looked at different ways we could talk about tennis and talk about our partnership with it,’ explains Falkingham.
Comment
This campaign sees Medibank, which has been a sponsor of the Australian Open since 2012, cleverly activate its flagship pro tournament sponsorship rights with creative that also blends with its community-based backing for junior tennis.
The concept also cleverly skirts around the difficulty of non top tier sponsors not having the rights or access to shoot marketing-led, low latency video of tournament action
‘As a sponsor, you really want to get your sponsorship out there, you want to get views and eyeballs on the fact that you’re supporting the event,’ added Falkingham.
‘Everyone’s trying to be a broadcaster, but we don’t see that as our role. We’re not there to try and tell the score each day and who is the favourite to win. We’ll track pretty closely the social conversation, work out what people are talking about and we’ll just tap into that. We’ll have it online in real time and will be able to get Medibank involved in a nice way.’
Medibank, a government-owned, quasi-private health insurer, is involved in several sports sponsorships from the Melbourne Marathon and other running festivals in Brisbane and Perth, as well as the ‘Medibank Wave Warriors’ junior surf lifesaving event and a partnership with The Icehouse (Melbourne’s premier ice sports facility).
Its other major tennis initiatives include backing ‘The Medibank Junior Development Series’
Links
Medibank Be Magazine
http://www.medibank.com.au/bemagazine/
Medibank YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/MedibankPrivate
Medibank Website
https://www.medibank.com.au
Medibank Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/Medibank
Medibank Twitter
https://twitter.com/medibank
Australian Open
http://www.ausopen.com/
