Client: Sky Campaign: Sky Sports Start of Season Best Newsbrand Campaign   Executive Summary: Football fans are a passionate bunch and, as the home of the Premier League, Sky Sports knows that better than anyone. To fight off the challenge of BT Sport we gave fans what they want – campaigns about the club they love. This delivered a 40% increase in purchase intent, considerable for a brand as established as Sky. Background and objectives: Increase preference to keep current customers and win new ones The start of the new football season is a key growth period for Sky Sports. This summer Sky were facing a football battle like never before with Champions League rights moving from Sky Sports to BT Sport. Sky Sports is still the best place for domestic football with the Barclays Premier League, both in terms of volume and quality of the games. We needed to make sure consumers weren’t swayed by the new claims from BT. Part of the message was the Sky heritage, something BT Sport doesn’t have. It has been 23 years since Sky Sports started showing football in the UK, and every season, through experts and analysis Sky Sports brings football to consumers like no-one else can. Above and beyond just advertising the new season, we needed to deliver the message that the Barclays Premier League is the best in the world and that Sky Sports is, and always has been, its home. The primary objective was to reinforce brand preference by landing Sky Sport’s superiority in football. Brand awareness of Sky Sports is sky high, so the challenge was to deliver on the key Sky metric, Intention to Purchase. Insight: Different fans see the Premier League through different eyes

The Barclays Premier League is the most exciting and engaging league in the world, there is no other league where we see as much action and dramatic moments every season. And the fans? They are the most passionate bunch in the world.

We did a little experiment: we put a few football fans in a room and showed them a highlight reel of the best goals from the previous season. Then, we asked them which ones they remembered most. The result made sense: the goals they most remembered were the ones scored by the team they supported.

We knew how we could make this campaign bigger and better for all the football fans out there: make it personal. Based on our experience of 23 years of historic moments, we

     

 

created advertising that resonated with our audience in a truly personal way: their own Premier League campaign.

The Plan: It’s your Sky Sports Let’s set the scene: if you are a Manchester United fan, your Sky Sports Premier League campaign will be all about your team. Wayne Rooney celebrating his incredible bicycle kick alongside your Manchester United article in print, on your way home on a 48 sheet, in your social media feed, in VOD with a Sky Sports pundit sharing their opinion, in your email, in your apps, on a website you visited, on your Fantasy Premier League page… this is season is all about Manchester United. Or at least, it is for you. We used this approach across every single media channel, handpicking creative based on titles, location, behaviour and context across 8 key Premier League teams: Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, Southampton, and Tottenham. Across Newsbrands we were able to deliver contextually relevant, team specific creative in national press (an article about Chelsea next to a creatively relevant Sky Sports Chelsea advert) and geographically relevant team specific creative in regional press. Online, we delivered relevant team specific creative based on behaviour. Newsbrands were the ideal platform due to their capacity to target fans of specific teams and align with compelling editorial, enabling Sky to deliver a targeted and valuable experience to readers. Results The campaign shifted key brand metrics and achieved the primary objective to increase purchase intent:

• +40% in purchase intent • +59% in word of mouth for the campaign

Online, activity on our Newsbrands’ sites performed extremely well, smashing all benchmarks for display, with the Daily Mail beating the benchmark interaction rates three times over. All sites beat the Sky benchmark average interaction rate of 1.76% (already above the UK benchmark of 1.39% according to DoubleClick) Client View “This was the most challenging campaign we’d set ourselves in Sports, both in terms of wider competitor landscape and creative execution & delivery. We wanted to create something that resonated with fans of the Barclays Premier League and generated widespread conversation about moments from the league. At its heart was a very simple approach, bringing fans what they love, the drama, goals and excitement, in a targeted relevant way. This is something we feel we hope we’ve achieved whilst placing Sky Sports at the heart of this to further anchor us to the Barclays Premier League.”

Nick Hand, Sky Sports Marketing Controller