Advertiser: BEIN SPORT
Agency: TBWA\FRANCE
Category: Publications & Media
Advertising campaign: A TOTAL REVOLUTION IN FRENCH SPORTS BROADCASTING
Business Director: Céline Baeza-Laporte (PHD)
Business Manager: Nicolas Skouras (PHD)
Managing Director: Bertrand Beaudichon (PHD)
Executive Director: Marc Fraissinet (TBWA)
Strategy
Launching Al-Jazeera Sport in France’s competitive Pay-TV market was always going tobe tough. Negative associations with the Middle Eastern broadcaster ran deep, but with a new name and new multi-channel offering, having signed deals with major international properties, it was the ONLY network to offer ALL games of ALL sports in the one place – BeIN Sport.French sports fans are among the most passionate in the world, and among the most loyal, having stuck with the market’s dominant network for over 30 years, despite many new players having come and gone during that time.They make a TOTAL commitment – both to their teams and their channels – so this becameour connection point. To win them over we put the concept of TOTALITY at the centre of everything we did. so that anytime French fans thought of sport, they thought of beIN Sport.
Execution
•We chose a specific target audience, predominantly men 25-49 – TOTAL sports fans willing to pay for a sports channel.•We put our messaging into TOTAL SPORT contexts to become a part of all major sporting moments in our target audience’s lives.•Our communication plan was TOTALLY matching the year’s sporting calendar, leveraging every game as a special event.•We started with fans themselves, engaging them in social media to build awareness and word-of-mouth before any on-air activity.•In an industry-first, social media elements were integrated into live broadcasts to drive engagement way beyond the usual at-home viewing experience with simultaneous broadcasts, one with fans’ live Tweets as the only ‘commentary’.•A laser-targeted plan reached fans through all efficient touchpoints : TV, Print, Digital, Mobile,Geo-localized Out-of-Home with customized creative messages to build a sense of proximity with fans, and a Direct marketing club kit.
Effectiveness
A TOTAL success:Awareness grew from 7% to 55% in 6 weeks (more than 20 percentage points above awareness of one of the brand’s main competitors)We engaged fans: 170,000 Facebook fans, 71,000 Twitter followers and over 1 million visits to www.beinsport.frThe campaign drove over 600,000 subscriptions in 4 months, almost DOUBLE our target, with over 1 MILLION in 6 months – one-third of our target audienceThe strategy has proved to be very efficient as we achieved a 1.72 ROI.beIN Sport has become a TOTAL must-have for French sports fans and a key player in French media landscape.