BT Sport knew they had a great product, and believed that if more people sampled our coverage, it would translate to greater familiarity, consideration and sales. We needed an approach that would put our content in front of as many people as possible but at the same time, would not cannibalise future subscriptions to the TV channel.

The idea was a dual pronged digital strategy that encompassed gathering prospect data in an audacious sampling stunt, followed by a highly targeted and personalized digital campaign to these prospects.

So to reach the largest audience, we partnered with the most popular live streaming service in the world – YouTube, and in a world first live streamed the entire coverage of the UEFA Champions League final. We then used the sampling audience data to launch the ‘Four Competitions One Venue’ and ‘Goals Recreated’ content series.

After successfully completing the first part of our strategy, we set about exploiting the sampling data in phase two with a highly targeted and personalised digital campaign.

Our first series of online films featured the biggest names in football, expertly blending footage from our four leading competitions into one exciting and utterly unique sequence, helping us to land our core proposition of “four competitions one venue”. Through retargeting, we then adapted our message and creative to specific fan groups by creating over twenty bespoke films (one for every Premier League club), highlighting the competitions their club would be involved in.

Finally our #GoalsRecreated films saw famous players attempt to recreate famous goals from across our four competitions. Fans loved watching the skills, banter and behind the scenes access. Each edit featured players that would be most relevant to upcoming matches targeting fans of those teams.

The live stream of the Champions League final was a world first and the biggest ever in the UK on YouTube. In total the sampling event generated 4.3m prospects cookie data which could be re-targeted. The ‘Four Competitions One Venue’ campaign was viewed over 17 million times (becoming the most viewed campaign during the summer on YouTube) and the Goals Recreated series has achieved more than 100 million views (84% organic views), 1m likes and over 50k shares.

CPC of re-targeting the live stream audience was 69% cheaper than standard retargeting activity in the same period, also delivering an exposed Cost Per Acquisition that was 60% lower than our site retargeting activity.

Familiarity of BT Sport increased by 43% and Consideration increasing 22% - far surpassing equivalent benchmarks for campaigns with similar media spend.

This resulted in a 13% increase in subscriptions and a ROMI of 170%.