O2 Fives

Background

With just £5k to play with, the brief was to expand awareness of O2’s sponsorship of Arsenal; to identify football fans on the database; and of course to create unbearable levels of envy amongst non-O2 football fans.

Idea

The answer was O2 Fives. This gave football fans the chance to play at Emirates Stadium – one of the best football venues in the world.

Fans across the country like the way Arsenal play the game. So they wanted to find the most-liked five-a-side teams and reward them by hosting a tournament on the hallowed turf.

Arsene Wenger introduced the competition on the O2 Fives homepage. The word was soon spreading on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Teams had their own page on O2’s blueroom but the rest was down to them. Using social media, they promoted their own page. And they got friends to click ‘Like’.

To keep interest high, weekly videos were released of Arsenal players showing their likes. Teams were also given the chance to have their name advertised pitch-side.

Results

The results were remarkable. Over 560 teams entered the competition. There were 817,000 unique page visits and 317,000 ‘Likes’. The campaign was top of O2’s trending for two weeks with 71% positivity. Even the players got involved, with Jack Wilshere (535,412 followers) and USA’s Stuart Holden (176,313 followers) tweeting about the campaign. Which all resulted in over two million people reached.

Our Thoughts

There is no justice in this world. In return for five years of exceptional work across all categories including direct mail, digital, mobile and integrated, not to mention some guerilla marketing, a bit of outdoor and some technological firsts (with ‘Stareout’, for instance) 02 have said thank you to their agency of record by putting the business up for pitch.

I really do not believe any UK agency other than AIS has the skills to be able to handle a client with so many differing needs let alone the talent it takes to come up with brilliant solutions time after time.