How Sports media organisation Eleven Sports activates their fanbase to enhance their fan engagement.
Eleven Sports delivers thousands of hours of live sport and entertainment to fans around the world, through a network of regional channels and a global streaming service. From the biggest leagues in the world like LaLiga, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, UFC and NBA, to the Belgium Jupiler Pro League. Eleven Sports is challenging how live sport is packaged, delivered and consumed, with a flexible offering that democratises sport content for fans everywhere. Eleven Sports makes all of this available to the global community of sportfans, wherever and however they want to experience it.
During weekdays, there are fewer live sports matches to watch, making Eleven Sports mostly relevant to consumers during weekends. Since Eleven Sports uses an OTT platform, they have the opportunity and flexibility to provide a wide variety of on-demand content to the consumer, on any device. However, there are always new ways to connect even more with fans, especially with the assistance of digital technology. The question is how? That is where Sports Cloud comes to the rescue.
“Every football fan fondly remembers the glory days of their favourite club, and these days are visualised by the shirt of that time. With this campaign we unlock 50 years of Belgian premier league football, and together with the fans we go on a journey to find the most iconic shirt of those times”.
Together with Eleven Sports Sports Cloud created a campaign for Belgian soccer fans: the Ultimate Shirt campaign. With this campaign, we asked Belgian football fans to go back 50 years in time and select their favourite football (team) shirts from an historic database of more than 1,500 shirts. During the months of December and January, football fans could vote for their favourite top 3 team shirt. During a first round of voting, more than 50,000 soccer fans already cast their votes, with an opt-in rate of more than 40%. In addition, we gave fans the opportunity to share their top 3 on social media using the hashtag #ultimateshirt. This delivered the campaign as a trending topic on twitter in Belgium within a few days.
Due to the success of the first round, we decided to expand the campaign further using a knockout system. A week prior to the start of the play-offs in Belgium, we gave fans the opportunity to choose one ultimate shirt per club. At the end of this round, out of 26 participating clubs, 16 clubs remained to compete against each other for the title of the Pro League Ultimate shirt of all time. In the end, the Club Brugge shirt from the 1988-89 football season was voted the most iconic shirt of the past 50 years by Belgian football fans.
1,750 shirts were digitized from 50 years of Pro League. The most iconic club shirts were integrated as Panini stickers in the 21-22 album. The Reveal of the Ultimate Shirt took place during the Jupiler Pro League gala. The result of the 'Pro League Ultimate Shirt' competition was officially announced at the annual Pro League Awards. The Ultimate Shirt campaign ultimately achieved the following milestones:
fans participated
opt-in rate for marketing
on average time spent on website
impressions on social media
Shortlisted for the Sports Pro OTT Awards 2022:
on Twitter in Belgium
Do you want more information about this Eleven case, creative activations and enrichment of your database? Feel free to contact Tomas Overhof.
Senior Account Manager
