Nivea For Men launched a football campaign to leverage their sponsorship of the England football team, the combined videos from ‘Great Football Experiment’ campaign received more than 3.35m views on YouTube.
Nivea For Men are an official sponsor of the England football team. They wanted to use digital channels to target the male market, so they launched the ‘Great Football Experiment‘ campaign.
The ‘Great Football Experiment’ was a chance for a Sunday League football team to receive professional coaching, physiotherapy, nutritional advice, training on how to do the ultimate goal celebration and even a chance to play against some of the ex-England football players.
To be selected, entrants were asked to record and upload a video of themselves explaining why they deserved to be at the centre of this campaign. Nivea For Men received over 600 entries from Sunday League football teams across the country.
To further drive engagement, they asked the public to vote on their favourite team video. The winner of the competition was Essex-based, Ivory FC.
Ivory FC embarked on ‘The Great Football Experiment’ by meeting their FA-qualified coaches, who included ex-England internationals Ray Wilkins and Ray Clemence, and former national manager Terry Venables. To ensure the players stayed in peak condition to make the most of this coaching, they received further professional support from top physiotherapists and nutritionists. Meanwhile, a brand new kit, supplied by Umbro, made sure they looked the part.
To help the team celebrate any improvement in style, Ivory FC was given lessons in the ultimate goal celebrations from Icelandic team, Starjnan FC who have become famous for their imaginative celebrations and skill on the pitch. All of this training and preparation then culminated in a final match against a team of ex-England internationals.
The teams journey leading up to and including the final game against the ex-England football stars were documented by video. The videos garnered more than 3.35 million YouTube views throughout the season, helping drive over 1,000 new subscribers to the Nivea YouTube channel. This was supported by more than 65,000 Facebook likes which were generated by the content over the season, growing website traffic by over 200,000 visitors.
Matt Marlow, Digital Manager for Beiersdorf, commented, “The Great Football Experiment campaign has been hugely successful at enhancing the power of an traditional marketing activity by harnessing the power of digital. By investing in the integration of digital into the campaign, alongside the successful sponsorship of the England football team, we have extended the reach and ongoing attraction of the campaign in a way that is better suited to the behaviours and content consumption habits of our target audience.”
This is the first video of the campaign, you can watch the rest of the videos at www.youtube.com/niveaformenuk.
