| Title | IT PAYS TO EXPERIMENT |
| Brand | THE SUN - NEWS UK |
| Product/Service | DREAM TEAM |
| Category |
C01. Content |
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Entrant
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PULSE CREATIVE London, UNITED KINGDOM
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Idea Creation
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PULSE CREATIVE London, UNITED KINGDOM
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Media Placement
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PULSE CREATIVE London, UNITED KINGDOM
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PR
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PULSE CREATIVE London, UNITED KINGDOM
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Production
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PULSE CREATIVE London, UNITED KINGDOM
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Credits
| Sam Mellis, Rob Pritchard-Jones, Richard Kenyon, Nigel Webb |
Wunderman UK |
Art Director, Copywriter, Creative Director, Creative Director |
| Will Martin |
News UK |
|
| Charlotte Pike |
News UK |
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| Kate Bird |
News UK |
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| David Robinson |
News UK |
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| Claire Gribben |
News UK |
|
| Robbie Williams |
News UK |
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| Parjeev Kalirai |
News UK |
|
| Joanna Niemiec |
News UK |
|
| Greg Halfacre |
News UK |
|
| Alex Carapiet |
News UK |
|
| Harry Hayden |
News UK |
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| Mark Hudson |
News UK |
|
| Josh Clarke |
News UK |
|
| Keith Drewrey |
Pulse Creative |
|
| Alex Parr |
Pulse Creative |
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| Natalie Pickering |
Pulse Creative |
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| Matt Thomas |
Pulse Creative |
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| Yannis Fairfield |
Wunderman UK |
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| Michael Maxwell |
Wunderman UK |
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| Mark Wake |
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| Michael Tredway |
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The Campaign
In the face of competition, Dream Team (fantasy football) had to retain players from last year – and pick up new ones.
The Dream Team community is known for its irreverent banter. We needed an angle for the new season’s game that would resonate with the fans who enjoyed the humour and robust exchanges on the DreamTeamFC site.
Our insight emerged from last season’s data. Everybody marvelled at how Leicester City had made the early running, and had ended up trouncing the bigger, more famous clubs.
But we saw how only 0.19% of Dream Teamers last year had spotted Jamie Vardy’s potential at the beginning – and how he would outstrip better-known footballers such as Rooney and Hazard.
It was no longer enough to pick celebrated strikers and defenders and then sit back as they accumulated points for your team.
Now, more than ever, it paid to be brave.
Creative Execution
The creative output was a perfect blend of direct response work, cleverly overlayed with engaging, witty creative.
We spoke to our audience in the unique Dream Team tone that they’ve come to know and love. Our creative proposition: “It pays to experiment” used well-known nicknames of Premier League clubs and we devised innuendo-laden scenarios to encourage our audience to consider experimenting with their picks, including “SLIP A TOFFEE IN THERE” (ie, pick an Everton player) and “TRY IT WITH A SWAN” (ie, select a Swansea player).
For our high-value segment, we could afford to invest more so in a digital-first for News UK we developed a hyper-personalised video individually rendered with details completely unique to them, including their surname, team and league name and overall score. We then set them the challenge to beat it this year. This was delivered within emails with 200,000 individually created header graphics which showed the recipient’s name on the back of a football shirt.
We further personalised email copy according to an individual’s performance last year. Those performing well were labelled “the Ranieri’s” of their league, and those performing badly the “Moyesy’s”. We also tailored emails by club supported, for example, inviting Arsenal fans to play safe by picking Ozil, or experiment and pick Siggurdson.
Finally in the run up to season kick off we included banners with dynamic countdown timers that ominously ticked down to season kick-off, really driving home the urgency to sign up.