Title	LIDL FAN CUP
Brand	LIDL STIFTUNG & CO.
Product/Service	LIDL, THE LEADING GROCERY RETAILER IN EUROPE WANTED TO TRANSFER THEIR KEY MESSAG
Category	A09. USE OR INTEGRATION OF DIGITAL OR SOCIAL MEDIA
Entrant Company	McCANN WORLDGROUP GERMANY Frankfurt, GERMANY
Contributing Company	McCANN WORLDGROUP GERMANY Frankfurt, GERMANY
Contributing Company 2	MRM // McCANN WORLDWIDE Frankfurt, GERMANY

Name	Company	Position
Ruber Iglesias	Mccann WORLDGROUP	Ceo
Elke Klinkhammer	Mccann WORLDGROUP	Cco
Frank Ladner	MRM/Mccann	Cto
Andreas Brueckner	MRM/Mccann	Managing Director
Martin Biela	MRM/Mccann	Group Creative Director
Dom Heinrich	MRM/Mccann	Creative Director Innovation Advertising
Mark Hollering	MRM/Mccann	Creative Technology Director
Maurice Racz	MRM/Mccann	Strategy Director
Philipp Schlosser	MRM/Mccann	Sen. Creative Concept
Jacqueline Grochalski	MRM/Mccann	Visual Designer
Anna Chetchetka	MRM/Mccann	Art Director
Christian Endecott	MRM/Mccann	Copywriter
Andreas Gruener	MRM/Mccann	Sen It Project Manager
Markus Goerg	MRM/Mccann	Sen It Architect
Sven Kraeuter	MRM/Mccann	Maker
Stephan Rappl	MRM/Mccann	Management Supervisor
Anna/Katharina Ley	MRM/Mccann	Account Manager
Kati Kempe	MRM/Mccann	Content Coordination

The Campaign

LIDL, the leading grocery retailer in Europe wanted to transfer their key message - exciting and successful shopping - from local stores into the digital world. And, as an official FIFA partner in 2014 they set out to place it in the context of football. The world cup 2014 was approaching and fans from all nationalities, cultures and languages were beginning to feel its pulse. Through one great idea, we gave all football fans, a truly unique opportunity: To win the world cup for their own country and in turn, experience the goal-like feeling of great shopping at LIDL. In every world cup emotions run high, especially during penalty shootouts. But sadly, there’s little fans can do to influence the moments of decision. The truth is, they are relegated to being spectators. Recognizing fans desire to take action, we created the Lidl Fan Cup: “Play online. Shoot offline.” The Lidl Fan Cup was an enormous European foosball tournament. It was aimed at all football fans and Lidl Facebook Fans alike. Our goal? To transport the emotions of shopping at Lidl by letting fans experience the scoring of a goal for their own country.

Results

In a 6-week tournament, fans from 23 countries engaged online, shooting offline on real foosball tables. To bring our idea to life, we did something never done before. We engineered 50 electromechanical, web-connected foosball tables. In order to control the game, we developed a Facebook web-application. No installation and no plugins were necessary, letting fans play against each other for their own countries from any location and any device. The Rules? Penalty shootouts only. 3 turns to score and 3 turns to defend. In order to plan their moves, players saw a replay of each shot from three different angles. Winning 3 points, draw 1point and 0 points for loosing. The tournament featured all stages of a world cup, from preliminary rounds to the final. And considering each country’s size, we averaged the amount of games with the country’s collected points.

The 50 tables, each with 2 playing fields, were branded with 25 Lidl product lines. After each move the playing fields were randomly switched. The banners were displayed as Arena Brand Names 2 seconds before the game started. The Intro of each replay included 25 different camera flights over the foosball tables. The replay itself showed the branded banners, which were visible for 6 seconds from three different angles. And at the end of the score, once again the arena brand name was displayed. Some countries additionally displayed Facebook-user targeted Intros with special brand cooperations. Finally, every user saw advertising for 84 seconds per game, but this was only seen subliminally and not perceived as actual advertisement, because to soccer fans are used to arena brand names as well as branded banners.

Player engagement of over 10 minutes per visit, countless shares on Facebook and twitter, an increase of followers of more than 500.000 Fans for Lidl. That is 300% more than the average number of new Fans during this period. And with broad coverage by several media channels in Europe, in just 6 weeks the campaign earned 100 Million impressions and 4 million Euros in coverage. The 50 with Lidl products branded arenas generated more than 100.000 hours of branding during the tournament. And the winner? The Lidl Fans of the Czech Republic! This was celebrated with a special voucher action via Facebook. More weird numbers: 302 cameras. 336 stepper motors. 10km cable. 300 moves per minute. 181.168 motions for each motor. 1.350 TB Video-Traffic. 1 striker.