Canterbury rugby sports apparel was the official apparel partner of the Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan and supplied kits to the volunteers and officials of the tournament, as well as six teams: England, Ireland, USA, Canada, Russia and Georgia. The Canterbury Spreadshhhheets was part of Canterbury’s Be Part Of It campaign, which celebrated how the Rugby World Cup 2019 brought fans from across the world together.

UK is Canterbury’s largest market, and for the UK fans the main issue with the Rugby World Cup taking place in Japan was the fact that most games happened during working hours due to the 8-hour time difference. It put the fans in a moral dilemma; risk getting caught at work watching the games or not watching the games at all. For rugby fans option number two wasn’t an option.

Canterbury wanted to help as many fans as possible.

Canterbury rugby sports apparel was the official apparel partner of the Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan. They wanted to help fans who due to the 8-hour time difference couldn't watch most games during the RWC2019 as they happened while most UK fans were at work. Since Googles spreadsheet is one of the most used work tools amongst the demographic, we turned that – as a world’s first - into a fun interactive entertainment media enabling fans to follow RWC2019 the matches in real-time.

The Canterbury Spreadsheet is a hack of Google live sheet that pulled in real-time rugby data from the RWC2019 and disguised it like 'next year’s budget'. We worked with it's limited design options to feature tons of in-game updates like live commentary and real-time stats in reactionary pie, column and bar charts along side an overview of the RWC2019 results, standings, match calendar etc.

Besides an entirely fake budget the spreadsheet featured real-time data feed from two already existing sport platforms that delivered API's providing all sorts of data during the entire Rugby World Cup. From both API's the most exiting data for fans was used, such as; match details, score, time, and commentary - displayed in sexy columns as plain text.

These real-time game stats were presented in live, reactionary pie, column and bar charts:

- Ball kicked (represents who's got the upper hand)

- Line outs won

- Scrums won

- Turnovers

- Tries, penalties and conversion

- Cards

It also gave fans a complete overview of how the RWC2019 evolved as the tournament progressed with the standings in each pool, calendar of upcoming fixtures (for fans to plan when to fool the boss again) – and the rankings of each team.

Everything reacting in real time and all autonomous.

We used the real-time data from the RWC2019 (provided by external sport API's) to create a complete fake spreadsheet looking like 'next years budget', which allowed fans to follow the match at work on desktop and on mobile - without getting caught by the boss. We worked with the limited design options in Google Sheets to display the most exiting real-time data the API's provided. Live commentary and real-time stats in reactionary pie, column and bar charts; match details, score, time, and commentary - displayed in sexy columns as plain text; and overviews of the RWC2019 results, standings, match calendar etc. Everything reacting in real time and all autonomous.

The Canterbury Spreadshhhheet was launched with a humorous film (+cut downs and GIF's) which was shared with Canterbury fans through social media. Canterbury's 10 rugby influencers (actual players) also helped drive further distribution to their fans. It's real-time, world first, content and the unsexy, non design, yet clever, appearance appealed to the 25-35 year old laddy target group.

The campaign promoted a campaign link linking to the Google spreadsheet. As Googles spreadsheets has a limitation of it's live users we created a code in the back-end for the campaign link which auto-distributed the fans to a new, autogenerated sheet (a copy) when more than 20 fans entered a sheet (for better performance).

The Canterbury Spreadshhhheet launched on 1st September and ran throughout the entire RWC2019 which ran until november 2019. The sheet is still live but no more live data is shown. What you see is the last games last info.

The campaigns total elements:

Film + 2 Cut downs

The spreadsheet it self on Google Sheets platform

10 Social posts on Canterbury social media platforms (Film & GIF's)

10 Rugby influencers sharing 3 posts each

The Canterbury Spreadshhhheets was due to its nature secretly shared between thousands and thousands of fans across the UK.

More than 750.000 click on the campaign link.

And The Canterbury Spreadshhhheets had a staggering average viewing time of 31 minutes per user in the Spreadsheet.

Measurable SoMe impressions were more than 6 million.

Sales during the campaign increased by 13,6% and 7,9% of that was linked directly to the campaign tracked using promo codes.

Survey results shows that the brand liking amongst the target group increased by 8,4% on the back of the campaign.

Social interaction across their platforms had a 744% better performance compared to their normal content.