2019 Winners & Shortlists

Background.

The FIFA Club World Cup was back with its 15th edition in the UAE from December 12th to the 22nd with popular clubs participating among those clubs were Real Madrid and River Plate. A competition with this caliber required business and media directives to be set in order to maximize its reach. The main business objective was to drive ticket sales to all matches and to create awareness, buzz from a media standpoint to entice football fans for attendance. Our mission was to drive fans to visit the landing page of the FIFA official website, which in turn would direct fans to ticketmaster.ae – a leading ticket sales and distribution company. However, direct click throughs to ticketing platform was not permitted which was a challenge and this expected a higher rate of drop-off in conversions.

Describe the creative idea.

The client had sent us the master creative for the campaign, but our challenges were: the player imagery usage on creative was not permitted and budget constraints on spend. Through our media and creative strategies, we designed a new approach that would be appealing to grab the audience’s attention. With our strategies in place, we recommended to the client to roll them out into three different stages; • Stage 1: Ticket Launch • Stage 2: Take the Field • Stage 3: Live the game + Tournament Period

Describe the strategy.

With diverse clubs participating from different countries and with the language barriers, we wanted to make sure that our strategy does not become fragmented with the aim to build seamless consumer journeys that interact well with different nationalities, and to deliver tailor-made universal communication. We divided our fans into 3 different categories, the strategy was to target them with messages that would fit each profile. Categories were per the following; • Club Followers: Football is life. Focusing on their team with full passion. • Football Enthusiasts: These are the ones who follow more than one team and are just excited about the matches. • Entertainment Enthusiasts: They see football matches as an opportunity to hang out with their friends and family to participate in the celebrations. Our secondary strategy was to entice our target audience to visit UAE as a touristic destination and enjoy the football event of the year.

Describe the execution.

To avoid fragmentation of the messaging and ensure that the primary objective is achieved we showcased the top clubs, targeting their followers with messages of texts, images and videos. Timeline • Phase 1: May 26th- July 7th, 2018 (Ticket Launch) • Phase 2: Sep 1st – Oct 31st, 2018 (Pre-tournament) • Phase 3: Nov 1st – Dec 22nd (Pre/During Tournament) Our programmatic tool was plugged into various Data Management Platforms that allowed us access to a huge amount of audience insights i.e understanding user behaviour and serving the ad to the relevant targeted audience. The execution included the serving of a live score feed to users as soon as they landed onto pages that had ad inventory, which we could bid on through our programmatic tool, allowing us to serve ads on even premium sports apps (365 Score, Goal.com, ETC.) and news websites (Gulf News and Khaleej Times).

List the results.

More than 150,000 tickets were sold in this competition, with an average of 19,000 tickets per match. Successful Ad Campaigns ran to boost site traffic across all social media platforms, resulting in; • Total Impressions: 47,294,703 • Total Engagement: 449,800 • Total Reach: 18,216,673 • Video Views: 3,372,481