Big idea: Get top football stars’ endorsement on a big occasion, for free.
Creative Execution
Sports 360 is the top sports magazine in the UAE with 40,000 copies distributed everyday. We paired up with them for 2 inserts over 2 days. The best part is that the magazine is a free publication, therefore eliminating a big barrier in reaching our target audience eyes, and ultimately their pockets.
The ads were also placed on GO Sport’s social media channels with a reach of more than 200,000 Followers. Most of these are Passionistas and current customers. Reminding them of what’s available in the store during a highly relevant occasion was guaranteed to convert leads into sales.
Using less than 0.015%* of what it would’ve cost us to hire the same football stars, and over 2 days only, this case proves that creating ideas that work does not require big budgets and long timelines.
* Total campaign cost was 10,000 AED compared to Cristiano Ronaldo’s $18.3 million sponsorship deal with Nike (Daily Mail, 2016).
Increase football gear sales (+10%): In the 2 weeks following, sales increased by 25% registering at 250% above our set objective.
Decrease in remaining football gear inventory (-60%): 80% of the remaining inventory was sold, exceeding our objective by more than 30%. This put us back within the normal season inventory leftover margin at 4%.
Posts of the ads on the GO Sport channels registered a 150% increase in engagement, including shares, likes and comments.
In real time we placed 2 insertions on newspaper as its content was created and put together for the public.
Using images selected by the editor. we retouched, composed and created our own artwork to deliver the message.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
We waited for that perfect occasion; Two big teams, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid were playing. In the first quarter final, Arturo Vidal scored to equalize the game and put Bayern Munich through to the semifinals. In the second game, Cristiano Ronaldo scored a dramatic hat-trick to put Real Madrid through to the next stage. We got what we were waiting for and we knew it was going to make headlines everywhere.
We headed to the Sports 360 magazine office right after the game, and as the editors chose the featured images for the next day news, we created our ads in real-time. On each of the images, we edited the star players Ronaldo and Vidal out of the picture to leave the exact replica of their gear only, the ones left in GO Sport’s inventory. Once the magazine article was finalized, we
placed our ad right next to it.