The Case
When we kicked-off our collaboration with 24 Media for auditing and totally redesigning their brands’ Social Media Strategy, we knew that we needed to push their biggest brand, SPORT24, to innovate and become the golden standard for sports publishing. After all, the “first mover’s” advantage is a real thing in that industry and the audience’s insane levels of engagement makes it the ideal setting for experimentation and innovation.
The Challenge
The “Great COVID-19” pandemic left no large-scale event unaffected. One of the greatest disappointments for sports fans in 2020, was the postponement of the football European Championship for precisely 365 days later. SPORT24 – being the #1 sports publisher in Greece – knew firsthand how thirsty the audience was, and prepared meticulously for dominating the social landscape of the tournament, assigning Imperius with the task of creating a fresh and captivating social-first activation.
The Approach
With the Greek National Football Team missing the tournament Final Stage, local fans turned (quite passionately) to supporting the “traditional” European football powerhouses: Italy, Spain, France, England, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany. Having unlimited access to the 24 Media online audience insights, we confirmed the most popular European National Teams and decided to design an Instagram-driven activation; one that could help the Greek fans easily signal and share their “true colors” for the upcoming EURO2020. How? By leveraging the classic combination of face paint and chants; a true staple in the football culture for decades now.
The Solution
Making full use of the Spark AR platform capabilities, we created a series of branded Augmented Reality filters, one for each of the popular national teams we had previously identified: a publisher’s first for the Greek market. The filters supported full face tracking, no matter the gender, the shape or the lighting conditions. To make sure that fans would quickly embrace and use our filters, we combined its launch with a very simple, yet effective giveaway: a) fans would have to find their favorite’s team AR filter and snap a selfie, b) they then upload it as an IG story mentioning @sport24, c) they became eligible for participating in cutting-edge selfie smartphone giveaway.
The AR filters were strategically published just one week before the EURO, with “fever pitch” being on an all-time high: more than 11K impressions and 9K opens were recorded, with thousands of sport24.gr readers and fans uploading stories of support for their favorite football team.
Winning EURO2020 without even putting football boots on.
