We believed we could win by helping our audience win. We knew our audience viewed themselves as smarter than the average bettor. So we chose to feed that self-view by creating an online content series that informed viewers about the aspects of sport (particularly football) that influence athlete performance and game outcomes.

In order to make this entertaining and compelling we created a series of experiments that would unveil the truth of factors like weather, home advantage, tactics and refereeing decisions.

We’d add credibility through the use of ex-players and athletes, academics, professional coaches and journalists. We’d add authenticity for the audience through the use of the F2Freestylers, who’d give us a strong connection with our hard to reach younger male audience.

The series was delivered between June and mid-September 2016, covering the “Summer of Sport”. The films simultaneously released on the F2Freestylers YouTube, Facebook and Twitter channels – coupled with organic release across Unibet’s website and social channels.

We drove interest to assets on Unibet’s sites by distributing minisodes of experiments from main episodes across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Unruly. Our audience was reflected in our buys through geography, age, gender and affinity for sports and betting. We served contextually in sporting environments and behaviourally retargeted based on view through rates and customer actions for subsequent content releases.

Individual markets were able to place assets into paid media dependent upon media coverage that matched our editorial themes. Further, social teams continually looked for organic posting opportunities depending on action during the “Summer of Sport”.

We delivered over 10m paid views and generated 16m earned views and 65m minutes of view time.

Brand studies from Unruly showed that unaided awareness of Unibet increased 90% in Sweden and 363% in the UK. Brand favourability increased by 26% in Sweden and 36% in the UK. View through rates averaged at 47% (huge on some of the longer 15 minute films) showed that we had real engagement with the viewers. Similarly our engagement rates on Facebook increased 38%. We generated around £7m equivalent media value via the F2Freestylers We amassed 26m views and 65m minutes of time spent by our audiences with our content. We opened 115% more new accounts than during World Cup 2014. Deposit amount during the campaign period was 70% more than World Cup 2014 and 265% more than Euro2012. And of all those new customers we acquired 34% have already placed a 2nd bet. Taking into account the increased level of winnings for our customers we generated an ROI of 18.25.