This case study outlines how a unique, data-driven customer insight helped fuel a creative campaign which exceeded campaign objectives despite a significant customer barrier.

Every year, Britain's most popular newspaper, The Sun, runs one of the biggest fantasy football competitions in the UK. ‘Dream Team’ allows fans to compete in mini-leagues by building a fantasy team of Premier League players who earn points based on their real-life performance.

Last season, we faced a monumental challenge. For the past two decades, Dream Team was free, but last year The Sun introduced a requirement for participants to input payment details for a free, two-month trial of 'Sun +', the business's paid-for subscription bundle.

This presented us with a clear challenge.

We needed to find a way to connect with our audience using an insight strong enough to compel people to play our brand of fantasy football despite the card barrier, with the understanding that most UK customers are skeptical about submitting payment details for fear they will be unduly charged. But how do we convince 600,000+ fans to provide payment details for a game that's been FREE for two decades?

We turned to our expert team of data analysts.

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.

In the UK football is a way of life. Fans are devoted, fanatical; and unswervingly loyal to their clubs – even when they’re languishing at the bottom of the league. Rivalries are fierce. Supporters are tribal. We therefore set about looking for insights that we could use to connect with our audience, and show that we truly understood them, and how they feel about football.

Our team of analysts started by scrutinizing five years’ worth of historic proprietary game data. They delved deep into behavioural triggers, engagement patterns, fan stats, player stats, channel usage, social chatter, segmentations, propensity models and more. It was a comprehensive interrogation of fan behaviours that had never been done before.

It wasn't long before we had our Eureka moment.

To our astonishment we discovered that our fantasy football playing base had actually been cheating on their beloved teams. They were picking rival players, from rival teams despite their deep-rooted hatred for the opposition. This was always seen as an absolute sin in the UK football community.

We delved deeper and uncovered some shocking stats:

o We revealed that over 1 million fans picked players from rival teams.

o 69% of Manchester United fans, picked a Manchester City player

o 56% of Arsenal fans selected from their arch-enemy, Spurs

o 82% of West Ham fans picked a Chelsea player

The data proved that the UK’s seemingly life-long loyal fans are promiscuous when it comes to fantasy football. We had tapped into a secret shame amongst fans torn between real-life loyalty and the opportunity to score points against their friends. This data insight was interpreted and distilled into the compelling creative proposition: “It’s not cheating, when it’s your dream team.”

And this was the inspiration for our creative work.

The insight that fans were cheating on their teams was not only a revelation, but a real, albeit previously secret, customer truth that resonated markedly with our target audience. It proved that we as a brand, knew football. That we could wholly and uniquely relate to our audience. 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.

We proudly heroed the statistics we’d unearthed through all facets of our integrated campaign. We used them on press ads to target fans of the most well supported clubs, demonstrating that we knew the percentage of their “true” fans that had actually been disloyal. We sent personalised direct and email campaigns showing star players from their supported team, and tempted them to pick star players from their rivals. We used a range of these facts and stats to fuel debate, conversation, controversy and banter across the complete spectrum of owned and paid for social channels.

As our campaign progressed, we continued to use social and real-time data to amplify the campaign. We created the hashtag #DTconfessions to unashamedly call out cheating fans on social channels. We then invited them to confess to their footballing infidelities before presenting them back through initiatives like “cheater of the day” infographics.