Our Dream Team campaign was based on the insight that fantasy football players often betray the teams they support in real life by picking stars from their hated rivals. Knowing the audience inside and out – from who they support, to who they selected last season – we developed a strategy which created a sense of urgency (to create a team in time), while remaining true to Dream Team’s cheeky, football-loving tone of voice. From Chelsea fans to Manchester United supporters, participants were reminded that it's OK to secretly cheer when a Tottenham player scored.Harnessing the campaign's insight on social media, we asked players to share their "infidelities" with us for the chance to win a football shirt. This, as well as an incentive-led email strategy, helped the business overcome a seismic change in the way customers join Dream Team – the need to input credit card details for the first time.

In terms of the campaign performance, the results speak for themselves. The effect of a strong data

insight packaged as a simple compelling creative proposition delivered over-target results that were

achieved against the clock in just 16 days. We exceeded all acquisition targets, grew our fan base

across all social channels, and delivered an impressive return on investment. The campaign was so

positive, that News UK view this as the most successful product launch they've achieved to date.

Over the course of the campaign, we –

Acquired:

- 636,596 players (up 6.09% vs target)

- 94,923 chairmen who set up mini-leagues (up 23% vs target of 77,000)

- 4.95% more Facebook fans

- 4.88% more Twitter followers

Achieved:

- A social reach of 16,709,763 impressions

- 12,195 engagements on Facebook

- 59,779 on Twitter

- The campaign hashtag #DTConfessions trended UK-wide for three consecutive days.

Delivered significant incremental customer value:

- Engagement with Sun Goals (the digital football app) rocketed by 678 per cent.

- We delivered a Return On Marketing Investment of 8:1

- We acquired 38% more premium paying players than targeted

- (For other figs, see confidential section)

Not only that – this insight helped us understand that people play fantasy football differently to how

they actually behave in the real-world. This helped us shape, develop and evolve the product, and

we are now looking at how we now build on this insight to make the next campaign as successful as

this one.

The insight that fans were cheating on their teams was not only a revelation, but a real, albeit

previously secret, truth that resonated markedly with our target audience. It proved we as a brand knew football, and it was something we could use in a playful, creative manner to really stand out in the pre-season media flurry and engage our player base. The statistics we’d unearthed became the focal point of our creative approach – and we cascaded it through all facets of our integrated campaign.

We took this historic game data generated by our own fan base’s behaviours and unashamedly presented it back to them. We cheekily provoked Arsenal fans on press ads highlighting that the majority of them had selected from their arch rivals Spurs. We then targeted the most well-supported clubs like Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea, demonstrating that we knew the percentage of their 'true' fans that had actually been disloyal.

We segmented our historic base by real-life club allegiance, then engaged them with personalised direct mail and email campaigns showing star players from their real-life team and tempting them to pick high-scoring rival players for their fantasy team.

As our campaign progressed, we used social and real-time data to amplify the campaign. We created the hashtag #DTconfessions to unapologetically call out cheating fans on social channels, inviting them to confess to their footballing infidelities, before collating this real-time data and creating initiatives like 'cheater of the day' infographics.

We’d taken a unique, strong, behavioural insight - beautifully articulated in the form of a simple percentage figure and used this to fuel debate, conversation, controversy and banter across multiple channels. With just one figure per club, we were able to resonate with our target audience to achieve a campaign that surpassed expectations.