By 2019, crowds at women’s cricket matches had been shrinking steadily for ten years. Despite the quality of the cricket, the world still saw it as a ‘gentleman’s game’. The advancement of women’s sport needed a renewed focus, and T20’s measure of success was a sell-out crowd for the final at the iconic MCG, to make history with the highest attendance for a women’s sporting event.

With interest in Women’s Cricket declining, talking about matches in isolation wouldn’t be persuasive enough to invoke the change we needed. A balance of creative execution, precision targeting, and strategic timing took our audiences through a narrative of camaraderie that progressively built affinity for this important cause. As the final was approaching, our precision model had identified the audiences most likely to attend, delivered team-specific creative messaging that encouraged people to rally behind the cause, and drove the ticket sales needed to help fill the MCG.

Previous women’s cricket tournaments had relied mainly on untargeted, broadcast media to drive interest. Without a historical database of people willing to engage in a women’s cricket event, we had to build our audience pool from the ground up.

We partnered with TEG to leverage ticket data from historical sporting events. This, along with qualitative research, enabled us to forecast sales curves identifying the distribution of ticket sales from release date to the event itself, for each match.

A live feed of sales and customer data, a tagging ecosystem across multiple digital properties and a network of data partners within the sporting and tourism industries, allowed us to track behavioural intent forming valuable segments based on team affiliation, ground proximity and behavioural interactions.

While the data ultimately provided the specific audience insight, we anticipated three key gates of sales behaviour summarised by three attitudinal motivations; Buy-the-event, Buy-the-Game, Buy-the-Experience.

The activity was separated into three phases over a six month period designed to build up to the main event. The majority of investment was concentrated in a 5 weeks period directly before each match to align with our sales curve models predicting when our audiences were most likely to purchase.

A large portion of the investment was attributed to TV/online video, social, programmatic display and OOH, supported by radio and press. A multichannel screen-led approach helped to effectively deliver our primary narrative; celebrating women in sport and paving the way for the next generation of female athletes. But we didn’t forget the nuances of our ethnically diverse audience. Multicultural publications were used to deliver match-specific messaging in strong and connected local communities.

Over 7.2 million audience signals activated in owned and paid channels

Over 600k personalised emails sent

100% increase in email send velocity ($0 extra operational and resource costs for T20)

150% increase in CTR engagement

20% cost-per-click vs Private Marketplace buys

156,627 tournament tickets sold

Over 95,000 final tickets sold; exceeding our forecast by 2000

Final crowd attendance: 86,174 (previous Women’s T20 crowd record: 12,717)

Highest attendance at a women’s cricket match ever

The final was the most watched women’s cricket match ever on TV in Australia – 1.2 million viewers?

Most watched women’s cricket event ever – 1.1 billion video views across ICC digital channels and 5.4 billion viewing minutes in India

Event of the Year at the Australian Event Awards 2020