Qualifying Games Viral Campaign
Issue 14 | March 2010
Agency
Lowe Sydney
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Dave Johnson, Creative Team: Dave Gibson, Nathan Lennon
Production Team
Head of Production: Lisa Brown, Digital Creative Director: Tom Markham, Digital Producer: Karim Hadid, Production Company: Ohtoplay Films, Director: Scott Otto Anderson, Producer /DOP: Oliver Lawrence, 3DAnimation: Fuel VFX
Date
Summer 2009
Background
Lowe Sydney’s task was to sell tickets for the matches when the Socceroos, Australia’s national team, played their all-important World Cup qualifier matches. The problem was a widespread belief in Australia that their team would qualify easily.
Idea
The tack the FFA adopted was to promote the opposition the Socceroos were going to have to face (Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Qatar and Japan) as being fierce adversaries, quite capable of knocking Australia out of the tournament.
The campaign kicked off with Azamat, a Uzbek fan, posting a video onto Youtube showing his team in training. The skills on display were incredible yet the way the film was shot it looked for real.
Uzbeki players were shown kicking balls at one of their own team-mates whose head was in the centre of a distant target.
Azmat
Results
Was it for real or wasn’t it? The result was very engaging and gave the viral films huge traction. The Uzbekistan video became the fifth most-viewed sports clip in the world within one week of being seeded and has accumulated over 750,000 online hits. With the next two virals showing the gymnastics of the Japanese goal-keeper and the athleticism of the Bahrain goal-keeper, the total of online hits has exceeded 1.2million.
Fox TV copied one of the ideas for a TV show but, best of all, Australia did get through to the Finals and will be in South Africa later in 2010.
Our Thoughts
The virals are very funny. I love the Bahraini goal-keeper’s Range Rover being used as a target by his team-mates so, of course, he flings himself manically to save every shot. But the really funny part of it is how the campaign started with Azamat sending out emails to known football fans and then baiting them from his Facebook page. Suddenly, hordes of Uzbekis wanted to be his Facebook friends. And that’s what helped the first viral go big. It doesn’t matter how funny a videos might be, people have got to get to know about it to watch it and this was very clever social media planning.