Traditional sports sponsorships focus on giving players and athletes the star treatment, but we wanted to focus on the real stars of the tournament: the fans. Orange would be there to celebrate them for their passion at every stage, shining the spotlight on them and giving them the credit they deserve but very rarely get.

With that we created ‘Orange Sponsors You’ – our way of giving the most passionate fans of EURO 2016 their own epic win. It was a new platform that shaped a truly integrated global campaign, from TV and digital channels to creating Fan Zones and an unforgettable fan experience at the stadium.

Our ambition was to celebrate the most passionate fans. But first we needed to truly understand how different countries express their love for their teams. So we mapped the language and common terms used by football fans on social across the 24 European countries qualified for EURO 2016.

Then we used a combination of keyword matching and sentiment analysis to monitor football fans’ passion on social across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to identify posts supporting each team. This data was aggregated in a real-time data visualisation ‘barometer’ built on the campaign site to track and display the nations with the strongest positive support.

But if we really wanted to prove to football fans that it was all about them, we had to do something spectacular. Every match night the fans showing the most passion on social saw their nation’s colours light the world’s most iconic landmark, the Eiffel Tower.

The Eiffel Tower light show powered by football passion became the icon of the UEFA EURO 2016.

The activity took off in social across the world, even in non-Orange markets, where the activity was not actively being promoted. More than 20 million posts from fans around the world were tracked to light the Eiffel Tower. Countries started to compete with each other not only about who would be the best on the pitch, but what nation’s fans would be the loudest supporters online.

#OrangeSponsorsYou was the most used branded hashtag of the tournament with 3.1m mentions, generating 1.9b estimated earned impressions.

And most importantly, Orange was the clear winner of EURO 2016 with a share of voice of 54% in Europe against other brand campaigns during the tournament.