October’s top 5 Best Branded Football Content Campaigns

This series will look at the best branded football campaigns of October from television advertising, to social media posts and online offers, as Digital Sport evaluates how the biggest names in business are using their partnerships in football to create stand-out content for their huge audiences to engage with everyday. 

Football is relentless. The sheer number of games an average fan can consume, along with the extensive media coverage from broadcasters, the written media, YouTube channels and even the high volume of football campaigns from sponsors and partners in the game, is endless. Fans are consumed in it all the time, whether it be when watching TV or scrolling through their social media feed.

With it being so constant, how does a brand find a way to stand out from the crowd and deliver a content campaign more memorable and effective than the hundreds it competes with on a daily basis?

We’ve found the five from October that we believe stand out above all the rest.

Coca Cola

In September and October, Coca-Cola offered the opportunity for fans to win tickets via their website. The promotion saw Premier League tickets on offer to those who applied via the link on the soft drink’s website, a promotion built around the fact the they sponsor the top flight of English football.

Premier League tickets don’t come cheaply for most fans, so the opportunity to win a pair will have been a wonderful opportunity to fans who don’t have that regular access and could do it with the small charge that comes with the purchase of a Coca-Cola.

Kris Robbens, Marketing Director for Coca-Cola Great Britain and Ireland, comments: “We have a long and rich history supporting football at all levels, from grassroots to the world stage. Premier League is one of the most exciting and diverse organisations in the world and we were excited to announce our partnership.

“Football has the unique ability to unite people who have a shared passion for football and the partnership gives us the opportunity to not only showcase the range of drinks we offer, but also give fans the opportunity to get even closer to the game via the campaigns and promotions we run.”

Carabao

Energy drink Carabao landed huge exposure and opportunities for fan engagement when their name rebranded football’s secondary cup competition from the ‘League Cup’ to the Carabao Cup. The tournament has had many different sponsors over the years: It was known as the ‘Carling Cup’ for a while, but the knock-out competition has had ‘Capital One Cup’ and ‘EFL Cup’ represent it by name as well.

With this huge exposure to football fans, Carabao have done well to run promotions and opportunities for their new following, ensuring to match their interests and promote on platforms like social media where most fans are likely to engage.

The best thing about the offer from Carabao, is that they’ve made it incredibly simple to enter yourself with a chance to win. As instructed on the tweet below, one must simply retweet the post, follow Carabao’s twitter page and tag a friend on the post. It’s very easy for fans to do: it won’t take them more than a minute and it gives people the chance to ‘have a go’ at potentially winning, knowing full-well they might not but that the effort put into giving yourself the opportunity is minimal anyway.

From Carabao’s perspective, they’ve done really well. Not only have they made it easy to access for football fans on a platform they’re always active on, but the ease of the instructions gives Carabao the opportunity for huge impressions as fan-followers retweet the post to their own followers, advertise the offer to the friend they tag in the post, and follow the page itself giving the profile the opportunity to tweet future offers and information to a bigger pool of people.

Being a Chelsea sponsor as well, Carabao have pushed this deal particularly with Chelsea games, with the tweet below highlighting the energy drink’s use of emoji’s and imagery to create stand-out tweets for peoples feeds.

Nissan

Nissan will be driving the Champions League trophy on a tour around four cities in Europe in their Nissan Juke. The tour started in Leipzig on the 19th October, and will be heading into Valencia, Lille and then London by the 7th December.

The car manufacturer are celebrating their 6th season as Champions League sponsors, and the tour of the trophy will see European football’s most prestigious honour on show for fans to see alongside a display of Nissan cars, including the Nissan Juke.

This opportunity is huge for Nissan, as the tour will naturally bring in interest from footballs fan who are desperate to get a glimpse and more of a trophy only usually seen from afar or in picture. There will undoubtedly be demand to engage with this tour, but hand-in-hand with that comes the display of Nissan cars that these fans perhaps won’t have considered or looked at before. It’s a great way to show off the product and drum up more interest by tapping into a market that might not have been engaged with before.

Adding to the exposure this tour will gain Nissan alone, UEFA have published an article on their website to announce the tour, which serves as further advertising for Nissan, as does their own Twitter post.

Heineken

Heineken are renowned in football for their sponsorship of the Champions League, and it looks like the beer company show no signs of stopping as they launched an advert on YouTube and their website, one that sees Ruud van Nistelrooy participating in ‘The Chase’.

The Manchester United and Real Madrid great is seen running from a group, only to be confronted before he finds a ball at his feet. He then runs past the chasers before dinking the ball over one of them, reminiscent of a famous Real Madrid Champions League goal of his.

Heineken do very well to get a familiar face of football in this advert and to play into the nostalgia of one of his famous career moments to make an engaging advert, one that’s fairly unique to others out there.

Emirates

There’s often big debate surrounding whether certain sport should be free to view for fans or whether paywalls and broadcast subscriptions are a fair price to pay. Well, while Emirates can have no impact on that whatsoever, they have managed to deliver a live stream of one of the most exciting moments for football fans, especially those of lower league teams: the FA Cup draw.

The FA Cup is considered ‘magical’ in the way it delivers upsets for more renowned football clubs, and the way it gives opportunities to lesser known teams to face off against the big boys of football. Well, in October the much anticipated 1st round draw was delivered live by Emirates on their Twitter page along with regular updates and build up. With the FA Cup Twitter page already followed by 320k followers, the Emirates name will have been displayed with every single post, retweet and comment that a huge footballing community would have engaged with throughout the draw.

The stream brought in 46.3k viewers, so it hit a huge audience, especially as it was delivered on a platform that people could watch on the go.

This article was sponsored by Snack Media, which is a leading independent sports digital media company with over 30m sports fans. They specialise in multi-channel content creation, distributed at scale. Through data driven engagement strategies Snack Media creates authentic connections between brands & fans. To find out how Snack Media can connect your brand with 30m sports fans, contact rupert@snack-media.com.

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