The England and Wales Cricket Board used Twitter to break down the boundary between online and offline activity during the 2013 Ashes. Will Collinson, Head of Marketing, talks to Figaro Digital about a campaign on the #RISE
If there are three things every marketer wants associated with their social media campaigns, they’re passion, content and meaningful interaction. The first and the last of those rely on audience engagement. But it’s your content that triggers users into action.
“You’ve got to give people an outlet for their passion,” says Will Collinson, Head of Marketing at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). “That’s what joins the online and the offline. You need to let people say what they think, feel or support about your brand. You’ve got to have the right content. And when you’re talking about something like cricket, the passion is already there.”
Anyone who spent the summer of 2013 rooting for Cook, Pietersen, Anderson and co. will know all about the extraordinary level of passion cricket generates in the UK. At the heart of the online activity was the ECB’s successful #Rise campaign. The project was built around the hashtag #RISE which, despite marketing budget restrictions, captured 16,8000 Tweets – more than 10 per cent of all global Twitter discussion of the Ashes. So how did the campaign work and what was it designed to achieve?
Pitching up
“Our role at the ECB is to get more people to play, follow and attend cricket matches,” says Collinson. “So when there’s a big event like the Ashes, we’re looking to get people inspired. That was the basic premise behind this campaign.”
Over the last five years, explains Collinson, the ECB has transitioned from a B2B to more of a B2C organisation. With over a million customers in its databases, it makes full use of email, social media and other online channels, as well as outdoor advertising. “Our objective,” says Collinson, “is to build on that and have more direct contact with people. Then we engage with them on an ongoing basis. That sets what we do in context. We’re in the fortunate position of not really having to sell tickets to an event like the Ashes. Instead, for 2013, we thought we’d do more to exploit general interest and grow our online communities.”
The project went out to tender in late 2012. The task, says Collinson, was “to come up with an inspirational, image-based campaign. We wanted a message that would galvanise support for England and build Ashes hype.”
With the campaign’s creative partners – including agencies Anonymous Fox and Recipe with support from Earnest – on board, attention turned to coming up with innovative content. This included player imagery used for still and video content, and an official Ashes poem entitled ‘#Rise’. (“They’ll deliver the fight, session by session/The nation’s pride their only obsession.”)
Breaking boundaries
In the run up to the Ashes, users were encouraged to congregate around #RISE, and the hashtag served as a bridge between online and offline activity. The imagery and video content was shown on outdoor screens near the grounds in Manchester and Nottingham, which in turn directed fans back to the hashtag. Significantly, notes Collinson, none of this outdoor space was paid for.
Once play got underway at Trent Bridge in July 2013, the news agenda naturally provided the campaign with additional momentum, meaning Collinson and the ECB team only had to take advantage of promotional opportunities, rather than concentrating on creating them.
“We wanted to get more people into our digital channels and then use that data,” he says. “One hundred and twenty-five thousand new people were engaging with our channels between June and August. We did a piece of research at the end of the Ashes and 71 per cent of our respondents said they were more likely to attend a cricket match next year and 52 per cent were more likely to play. That’s really important for us.”
One interesting aspect of the Twitter campaign was the ‘wall of support’ – a live feed displayed in the England team room pre-match where users posted their support for the players.
“The wall of support was immensely powerful because it makes fans feel part of it,” says Collinson. “They could put questions to players and so on. Without something like that, there’s a danger that a campaign like this can become static because you have no release for the hype.”
For a project like this to work, of course, everyone involved needs to be fully on board. Did that present any challenges?
“In any organisation, you have to sell the idea to the right people. You need the team’s management behind it. You need to understand what you want to achieve. Budget was a constraint so we had to prioritise on spend. We weren’t really able to buy media so it was about brokering relationships elsewhere. Those were some of the challenges we had to address in order to get cut- through.”
Collinson acknowledges that being part of the media agenda benefitted the ECB’s campaign but also stresses the importance of quality, original content.
So what can marketers in other industries learn from the way the ECB maximised fans’ engagement?
“We’re lucky,” he says, “because passion is something people really bring to sport and, as I say, you need to provide an outlet for that passion. You also need to be comfortable with social media. If people slag you off, you have to accept that that’s fine. We’re in a position now where, if that does happen, we can live with it because there’s so much good stuff that comes from social.”
Howzat?
As for the results – there were those 125,000 new fans engaging with the ECB’s digital channels. According to Twitter, 3.4 million Tweets were posted about the series (1.6 million of those using #Ashes – the hashtag of ECB, Cricket Australia and broadcasters) and #RISE was used 168,000 times during the series versus 77,000 for Cricket Australia’s #returntheurn.
The ECB’s site (ecb.co.uk) racked up more than 16 million page views and the YouTube channel (youtube.com/ecbcricket) got four million views. ECB’s ‘Daily Ashes’ emails from TwelfthMan – the Official Fan Community of England Cricket – were opened 900,000 times. A total of 311 local cricket clubs held Club Open Days over the five Ashes weekends, where thousands of guests watched the live action on Sky Sports.
The takeaway here? “It’s vital to get consistent integration right at the very outset,” says Collinson. “If you have that as a filter from the start, everything else will come together.”
Article by Jon Fortgang