Graphing the Game
Microsoft Office 365
Issue 29 | December 2013
Agency
Wunderman London
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Matt Batten Art Director Dan Fastnedge Copywriters Olivia Wagner Laura Burton-Rohde
Production Team
Head of Design Kevan Ansell Senior Designer Ian Saunders Designers Ben Richardson Stephanie Reeves Mirko Narddechia David Jorre de St Jorre Creative Services Manager Chris Farmer Project Director Mikael Gotlib
Other Credits
Senior Account Manager Jared Howe Strategist Dave Austin
Date
April to July 2013
Background
Microsoft wanted to generate awareness that they were a major sponsor of the British & Irish Lions rugby tour to Australia in 2013. But rather than a stock-standard sponsorship ad, Wunderman set out to create a link between Excel spreadsheets and rugby.
Idea
Microsoft Excel was used to create LIVE print ads that followed the Lions every move on tour. As each game was played, sophisticated sports-tracking software captured data from the matches in realtime – every scrum, lineout, try, kick, tackle and metre run. Within minutes of the end of each match, this data was fed into Excel to generate 3D graphs of the gameplay to produce ads instantly, which appeared in the newspapers the very next day after every game of the tour, alongside the match reports. Over 45 individual ads were created in which the Lions' match history was turned into bar graphs and pie charts.
The campaign was supported by sports commentator and former British Lion Will Greenwood in his daily sports column and Tweets to his 109,000+ followers.
A microsite housed all the graphs and fans had the chance to win a signed Lions jersey for writing their own headlines for the graphs in social media.
Results
There were over 15,000 site views and more than 4,000 mentions in social media, including on the blogs of former Waratahs in Australia and former All Blacks in New Zealand, each with over 120,000 readers. The campaign generated more than 6,800,000 earned media impressions, and reached over 2,676,000 UK rugby fans and many more around the world. Microsoft's fan-base increased by 7.5%. And the Lions made history and won the tour.
Our Thoughts
The secret of success in marketing communications today is being able to engage with your customers at the right time in the right place and with the right message. This is what Microsoft have managed to do. Get themselves in front of rugby fans at the precise moment they are reading happily (for the most part) about the Lions’ victories downunder. Stats are of endless fascination to sports jocks and here’s Microsoft acknowledging and rewarding that fascination.
I was interested to see on the website there were also graphs measuring the Twitter response to the games.
Great use of print to drive rugby nuts (like me) to the site, which was updated daily so encouraging regular visits, when one or two might even stray off into the main part of the site and learn more about Microsoft Business Solutions.