Today we continue our look in detail at how Nissan activated its sponsorship of the UEFA Champions’ League, going behind the scenes to discover the why, the how and the what of some of Ireland’s and the world’s biggest sports sponsorship deals and their coming to life…
The central theme of Nissan’s campaign over the initial two years of a four year deal has been to capture the excitement of the tournament.
Doing so live in the stadium environment is more real but with such a massive global audience it was always going to be in the digital world that most customers would experience what Nissan wanted to get across.
The key element of the partnership in these terms has been the Nissan Goal of the Week online and through social media that has created a longer ‘tail’ to each of the game weeks and driven fans into the Nissan marketing space.
The voting is hosted on the UEFA website giving maximum reach but each goal is preceded by a short, smart Nissan sting using Andes Iniesta and Thiago Silva as the brands two main ambassadors.
There is other rich content built around statistics on the importance of the goal, how many social media shares it generated and more.
Entry into the competition is by individual country of origin as well which helps Nissan to track the relative influence in each market. Data capture is facilitated through signing up for reminders of when each weekly competition opens up for voting and encouraged by their being prizes all the way up to winning a new car for those who vote.
Ahead of this year’s final the brand launched a competition involving taking a selfie and posting it to social media using the hashtag #TakemetoMilan.
25 winners got to go out on the pitch at the San Siro to wave the Champions’ League flag at half time and have their efforts seen by a watching TV audience of billions.
Ireland had a winner among the 25 but also had 1000’s among those who registered to have their name appear on the flag itself as well.
There was a smart widget on the website to enable you to search for your name among the near 25,000 that did so and it was another way of getting closer to the game even if you were away from the stadium.
The content was very sharable and has played a big part in lifting Nissan’s brand scores, a key objective of the sponsorship as we discovered in our interview with Jean Pierre Diernaz.
At the weekend, things stepped up a gear in digital terms with a 360 degree video feed live from Madrid watching the fans watching the game.
Monday: Interview with Nissan Head of Marketing, Jean Pierre Diernaz
Thursday: Match Day Activation
