The marketing challenge and brand insight:
It is impossible to overestimate the
importance of football in contemporary Turkish culture. For the
first time in Turkish history, both its local and national teams
are challenging at the highest level and football therefore is a
national obsession.
Lig TV broadcasts national football
league matches in Turkey.
Although the channel was popular among
Turkey's many football fans, only a proportion of these were
willing to actually buy a subscription. Our brand insight stemmed
from our research, which showed that a key obstacle to increasing
subscriptions that is particular to the Turkish market is the
tendency for 'football freeloaders' to watch games at neighbours'
houses to avoid paying for the channel.
Our marketing challenge, then, was to
highlight this consumer behaviour, overcome this price prejudice,
and therefore drive sales.
The consumer insight and communications strategy:
To increase Lig TV sales we needed to
get more people to pay for their own subscription, rather then
count on their neighbour's generosity. Our target knew their
behaviour was a bit on the cheeky side so we decided to provoke a
tipping point in order to convince 'football freeloaders' to switch
to their own subscription.
Therefore, our strategy was to
surprise them using an unexpected medium, at a time when their
interest in our message was highest.
In fact we ignored mainstream media
and instead created our own new medium, designed precisely to
exclusively target "football fans currently watching Lig TV at a
neighbour's house" designed to draw attention and create debate
around the 'football freeloading' phenomenon.
The creativity of the communication and activation:
We developed a campaign that
dramatised our target audience's dependence on their neighbour's
help and made them realise how much better it would be to be able
to watch Lig TV from the comfort of their own homes.
We did this by placing dummy 'football
fans' in the branches of trees in high traffic residential areas in
Istanbul, all dressed up in Turkish football club shirts, as if
they were watching the game through the window of a nearby house.
The message, written on a board hung up on the tree, was simple:
"you can't spend the whole season at your neighbour's window.
Subscribe now!".
The results:
By creating an entirely new and
utterly unique medium to target our audience, and by dramatising
just how cheeky their behaviour was - cadging off their neighbour's
generosity - we spurred the football fans into action.
The campaign generated extensive PR
coverage and drove a 25% increase in subscriptions.