Australian Rules Football is a national obsession. As a result, fans already get great coverage of football games on free-to-air TV. For the last two years Foxtel, Australia’s largest subscription television broadcaster, had sent a personalised DM piece to the member base of each Australian Rules Football club with modest success. Those who hadn’t signed up in previous years were unlikely to do so given the offer was actually more expensive than in past years. The key challenge was therefore to convince footy fans that subscribing to pay TV would get them closer to their team by creating an experience that justified the price. Whilst this claim could be supported by rational messages, we needed an idea that would engage fans on an emotional level and ignite conversation about why Foxtel’s Fox Footy channel was better.

Rather than just say Foxtel gets fan closer, we created an experience that proved it. A world-first in wearable technology, Alert Shirt literally connects fans to the game, allowing them to feel what players feel live as it happens. The shirt works with a phone App that captures real-time game data and sends it via Bluetooth to electronics inside the shirt. Here it is converted into powerful sensations that simulate the live play. What started as a DM brief expanded to become a commercial product, supported by a campaign of videos, street posters, social media, a dedicated microsite and PR.

4,000 shirts were produced to connect new subscribers and existing valued customers to their teams. In the first week of launch, Alert Shirt reached 2.1 million people through Facebook, created 400,000 Twitter impressions and received 135,000 video click-throughs - not bad for a country of just over 20 million people. Beyond the Australian football community, the conversation took off globally, attracting news coverage from Delhi to Detroit including Sky News, The Wall St Journal, Mashable and Contagious. But most significantly, we’ve changed the rules of broadcast television, transforming professional sport from something you watch to something you’re physically involved in.