It’s Not Cheating When It’s Your Dream Team

Background

Managed by The Sun newspaper, Dream Team was one of the largest online fantasy football leagues in the UK. It required soccer fans to make up their ideal team by selecting the best players from all the various teams in the Premier League. Then, as the football season played out, they accumulated points based on the performance of their selected players to see if their 'make believe' team was better than everyone else's.

In the UK, football was everything, and people would go through life supporting just one team. It was an allegiance handed down from generation to generation. No-one would ever dream of switching sides or supporting rival players.

Idea

The data revealed that despite their lifelong allegiances to a single team, fans chose players from rival sides when building their ultimate Dream Team.

In the previous season, 76% of Chelsea fans had chosen Spurs players (their sworn enemy) while 92% of Crystal Palace fans didn't select a single Crystal Palace player. This unspoken taboo was the insight for a campaign featuring fans trying to deal with the guilt of turning traitor against their beloved team.

The campaign included online film, press ads, social media, digital display, emails, and direct mail, which targeted members of different football clubs by using their own team scarf, embroidered with a salient fact about their fellow fans' cheating behaviour.

All channels drove traffic to dreamteamfc.com to sign up.

Results

The campaign reached 4,121,910 on Facebook and 12,434,032 on Twitter. Dream Team was mentioned in social an average of 1,905 times per day (up to 3,870 times), reaching over 500,000 people every day.

Facebook fans increased 5% (from 98,037 to 102,707) and Twitter followers increased 5% (from 95,571 to 100,016).

Despite the introduction of a pay- wall for the first time in 20 years, the campaign achieved over 630,000 registrations (5% above target) and usage of the Sun Goals app increased by 678%, creating a massive annual revenue stream (cannot be disclosed).

Our Thoughts

At the heart of this idea is data. In Cannes this year, Sir John Hegarty had a pop at ‘Big Data’ without realising that when they are properly understood, the numbers can give you the wherewithal for a big idea.

What would have fired up the Wunderman creative team was when they discovered they could find out exactly how many Chelsea fans had treacherously invested in a Spurs player for their Dream Team.

Now that is funny! The data has thrown up a genuinely fascinating insight – that secretly even the diehard fan knows his passion is completely, utterly and ridiculously irrational. The moment Manchester United fans start to think rationally, they start picking Man City players for their team. (Well, 65% do.)

Personalising the message through direct mail was, I would guess, where most fans would have been persuaded to hop over the pay-wall to play the game and to stay with The Sun. Because that’s what this is all about: data leads to more accurate targeting which leads to a better-looking bottom line. It’s just so much satisfying when there’s a big idea in the mix as well.