Jaguar: Feel Wimbledon

Credits & Description:

BRAND: Jaguar Land Rover
CATEGORY: Automotive
REGION: United Kingdom
DATE: June - July 2015
AGENCY: Mindshare
MEDIA CHANNEL: Digital,Mobile,Out-of-Home
Insight
In 2015 Jaguar signed as an official partner of the Wimbledon tennis championships. Mindshare's challenge was to change Jaguar’s brand perception, to modern and innovative, moving away from the ‘stuffy car brand for rich old men’ image. In a space where it couldn’t actually sell or showcase a Jaguar, it sought to prove its credentials in a way that is true to its core – to excite the senses.
For the last five years Jaguar has been struggling to shake off its image of being ‘a stuffy British car brand for rich old men’ and as a result was it was difficult to attract newer, younger drivers.
As a historic, British brand, partnering with Wimbledon could have made the brand perception issue worse. Wimbledon is a traditional brand with a 138 year history. The agency needed an idea that would avoid British heritage clichés and show off Jaguar as an exciting, ground-breaking brand.
With new cars packed with innovative technology, intelligent performance and slick design, it was about bringing this to life for a new younger audience and stepping away from standard automotive advertising, which wasn’t working.
Jaguar’s own mission ‘to excite the senses’ and its technological expertise meant it was in a great position to bring Wimbledon’s heartbeat to life.
Wimbledon is a thrilling and sensory experience and those lucky enough to be on Centre Court run the full gamut – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell (the Pimm’s and the freshly cut grass of course). TV coverage delivers two of the five, sight and sound, but what if it could give everyone a new sixth sense with which to enhance their experience? What if it could show what it feels like to be at Wimbledon, while proving Jaguar’s credentials?
Mindshare faced two immediate challenges. Firstly, Wimbledon is a ‘clean’ event so there is no opportunity to engage fans within the grounds aside from selling products, which Jaguar was unable to do. Secondly, long-standing partner brands such as Stella Artois, Evian and IBM have historically ‘owned’ Wimbledon fortnight with significant activation budgets meaning tennis fans were more predisposed to engage with those brands.
Strategy
Wimbledon can only be physically experienced by the 500,000 visitors that attend the 13 days of the tournament in London. For everyone else, we have to dip in and out of TV coverage, update services and anywhere else they can sneak a peak at the action as it unfolds.
The agency saw an opportunity to heighten the experience of tennis fans everywhere by capturing the live experience of Wimbledon and delivering it to them wherever they were. IBM uses data and technology to provide insight and statistics on the match play, but nobody was using it to provide insight on what it feels like to be there watching it.
#FeelWimbledon was born.
Mindshare would capture, in real-time, the biometric signals of watching fans, measure it, quantify it and then share it with the wider world to bring a new sensory experience of Wimbledon to life, using mobile technology.
Bespoke branded biometric wristbands were placed on 237 fans courtside allowing the agency to measure their heart rate, heart rate variability, movement and audio levels. This was a unique way of getting Jaguar inside the ground of Wimbledon.
Data transmitting beacons were placed on Centre Court, No.1 Court and ‘Henman Hill’ to enable it to capture atmospheric data and detect the varying energy levels of the crowd. The beacons captured audio levels and used infrared cameras to detect crowd density and movement.
Execution
The live communication was 100% real time and adaptive to enable Mindshare to respond to the most exciting tennis moments and it focused on targeting the media that people use habitually so it could reach them with a high frequency and keep them engaged throughout the day.
Tapping into their mobile social media behaviour was key for optimising real time engagement and digital OOH ensured it could reach people with impact and frequency due to their routine migration patterns.
From the first serve on June 29th to Championship winning match point on the 11th July, the agency streamed a total of 592 million human data points from its in-ground technology.
The data was analysed and interpreted to create a total of 487 pieces of unique mobile ready web and social content, and 133 pieces of unique digital OOH content, combining real time and post-match insights of the court side fan experience in range of different formats.
As Dustin Brown served to knock out favourite Nadal, passengers waiting at Waterloo station were gripped as the brand showed them a live visualisation of a fan’s heart rate combined with centre court beacon data, via concourse OOH screens.
Heart rate variability data and court-side beacons detecting crowd noise levels dramatised the highs and lows of the epic Watson v Williams match for tennis fans at Piccadilly Circus via a high impact OOH screen.
And as Andy Murray came close to bowing out in his third Wimbledon semi-final, the agency was able to bring shoppers at Westfield closer to the court side tension through a live visualisation of a tense motionless crowd from beacons and the rising heart rate of a Murray super-fan streamed live to their mobile and broadcast simultaneously to a large format retail digital screen.
Results
It was game, set and match to Jaguar at Wimbledon this year as this campaign smashed objectives to supercharge perceptions that Jaguar is an innovative brand and maximise share of tennis fan engagement versus other partner brands.
Perceptions that Jaguar is an innovative brand and is technologically advanced rose by 23% and 24%, respectively, amongst those who engaged with the campaign.
#FeelWimbledon was the most used hashtag of all Wimbledon partner brands, delivering a massive 65 million impressions and beating long-standing partners Evian and Stella with over 7,900 uses.
The campaign also took on a life of its own as #FeelWimbledon became the unofficial tag for people to express how they were feeling about Wimbledon, even British No.1 Heather Watson used it after her epic battle against Serena Williams.
The campaign achieved 27% SOV on Twitter versus other partner brands and a content engagement rate of 12%, outperforming any previous Jaguar content.
Exclusive #FeelWimbledon video content amassed 1.64 million views in the two weeks and the campaign earned 230 pieces of press coverage equating to £1.6m ($2.34m) earned media value.
Traffic to Jaguar.co.uk soared by 11% over the campaign period.