Case Study

Brief

Essence was given a three week period to target male football fans over the age of 18 and to support Betfair’s partnerships with Manchester United and Barcelona and its launch of www.betfairfootball.com.

Betfair tasked Essence with finding an approach which did justice to the digital outdoor medium whilst engaging football fans. The leading supplier of gambling products and services requested the campaign make great use of digital whilst backing up its other core channel activities.

Strategy

Football scores are the one piece of information that fans always want. As such, Essence devised an outdoor campaign that used these scores and engaged more interactively with supporters.

The main focus was to design and execute a digital outdoor campaign that delivered real-time football scores throughout London. The strategy would give fans the chance to keep up to date with football results at a crucial time in the season for European football.

With the aim to feed in the scores from Premier and Champions League matches to screens located across the capital, Essence also installed an interactive aspect to the campaign using SMS. This service was included in a bid to allow fans to respond to and interact with the brand to gain their unique free bet offer and above all increase engagement.

Execution

Bringing this campaign to fruition involved investment in the outdoor digital screens across JC Decaux’s PrimeTime network. Delivering a reach of 4.8 million passers-by, the twenty 18m² high-quality screens from Waterloo Bridge to Hangar Lane were on continuous rotation with a frequency of 1 in every 9 displays being for the campaign during a 3 week period. Throughout this time, a total of 1,120 hours of digital display were achieved. Essence also worked directly with JC Decaux’s technology partner to accelerate display update cycles from the normal 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

The custom ‘scoreboard’ that Essence created was produced with a multi-layered template design, which enabled dynamic creative execution from the fixture and scores feed. The activity on the screens comprised:
 

• The current scores of the matches that were in play
• Images of the current games’ team shirts

Throughout the campaign each screen delivered the ‘real-time’ fixtures and scores from all key games in the Premier League and Champions League. If during display there were no games in play, the creative instead showed ‘upcoming’ fixtures and kick off times, ensuring fans always had relevant and timely football information to hand.

However not only did the activity include display, Essence also designed and delivered a shortcode SMS response mechanism. The outdoor display showed a simple message above the fixtures, ‘FREE £35 BET. TEXT ‘BET’ TO 60006’, prompting fans to respond. In order to leverage fan enthusiasm and responses around each match, following their text, respondents received an SMS response with a redemption code for a free £25 bet voucher to be used on the new betfairfootball.com site.

Results

The Betfair Live Scores Outdoor campaign marked the first time anyone had used real-time information in outdoor display. It was a unique idea to support the launch of a critical new proposition from the client and was innovative is its approach to combining technology, creativity and media without losing sight of the overriding objectives.

1,120 hours of digital display were achieved throughout the campaign and it was estimated that the real-time display in fact reached 4.8 million in the target audience (18 year old male football fans), with an average frequency of 11.