Sportsbet: Case study

Credits & Description:

Agency: BMF
CLIENT Sportsbet
PRODUCT Sportsbet
TITLE Putting the Roid in Android
MEDIA TV, Online Film, Digital, Social, PR, Outdoor Guerilla
COUNTRY Australia
DATE OF CAMPAIGN 05 July 2017
BACKGROUND
Sportsbet’s goal is to dominate the mobile betting experience in Australia. The launch of the updated Android app was a key moment in achieving this.
But we hit a couple of hurdles in how we should promote our faster, more powerful Android app.
App updates aren’t really exciting news and our target audience of Android phone users didn’t think there was actually a problem for our new app to solve!
So without an actual story to tell, we were left with a confronting brief:
Make the new Android platform update Sportsbet’s biggest success story of 2017.
INSIGHT:
“Every punter is looking for an advantage, no matter how small. Whether it’s an ace in the hole or getting the inside track, punters are always looking for ways to increase their odds of success.”
Sportsbet’s new Android app: An unfair advantage
We needed to develop a genuine fame-inducing campaign that got people laughing, pointing, talking and sharing. As such, the launch of our new Android app became about far more than just downloads. We needed to provoke a reaction.
IDEA
To ramp up the unfair advantage that punters got from Sportsbet’s new ‘juiced-up’ Android app, we enlisted ‘performance enhancement experts’ from the sporting world to endorse and launch it.
Led by the infamous Olympic ‘enhancement’ expert, ‘88 Games Gold Medalist (for 48 hours) Ben Johnson, the group also included a Russian power weightlifter; an American yellow jersey-winning cyclist; and a champion Chinese swimmer. These endorsers came together to celebrate how Sportsbet put the 'ROID in Android.
Our cross-platform campaign was led by a 90' online content piece, supported by TV, radio, outdoor, digital and PR with a direct call-to-action for punters to download the new ‘juiced-up’ Android app and a tactical guerilla ad specially created for the Tour de France.
RESULTS
In their seminal paper, “Marketing in an era of Accountability,” Binet and Field (the Godfathers of Effectiveness) showed that campaigns that get people talking tend to produce better results across every business and brand metric, tending to be highly profitable.
And boy, did we get people talking.
What started as a few PC snowflakes getting into a ROID rage on social media, soon snowballed into a global news story…
Following major articles in the Herald Sun, Daily Mail and The Australian (to name just a few) and special features on Sunrise and 9News, the story of our new ‘juiced-up’ Android app was eventually picked up by the BBC and other global news websites.
The controversial Ben Johnson ad had incredible cut through and was loved by punters who understood the campaign was a spoof and parody.
Created to garner column inches, “Putting the ’ROID in Android” exceeded all of its objectives and was by far the most effective in Sportsbet’s history.
The advertising value of the PR was $8,879,164!
And Social media went crazy too, with 1,322,786 30+ views and 16,254 engagements!
This coverage had a dramatic 50% positive increment in Sportsbet’s brand favourability. (see chart)
230,000 new Android app installs.
And a hard to believe 22.2% increment in bets, 23.2% in turnover and 25.3% in first time bets.