No One Gets You Closer To The Game

Executive Summary

OneFootball is a leading football media platform connecting international fans to real-time scores, analysis and in-depth insights. With over 100 million monthly users, the app delivers consistent original content with no subscription – reinventing how audiences consume football content and transforming the relationship between fans and the clubs they support. Working in partnership with over 135 clubs, leagues, federations and players – the platform enables a new generation of fan engagement, connecting audiences to highly relevant and personalised football content.

In the Summer of 2022, OneFootball launched a cross-channel media campaign called “No One Gets You Closer To The Game”, which ran internationally and set out to reinforce the brand’s historical success as the destination of choice for football fans seeking exclusive sports content and broadcast coverage of live football fixtures.

The campaign was designed and delivered in partnership with SPORTFIVE, a leading global sports marketing agency specialising in ground-breaking first-to-market campaigns. Operating across more than 50 international offices, the SPORTFIVE team utilises the medium of sport to unite passionate fan audiences with pioneering brands, rights holders, and premium entertainment outlets. SPORTFIVE executes on perimeter advertising for many top football clubs across Europe, and further extend their work in esports and gaming by utilising Bidstack’s in-game advertising formats to take that reach into several virtual football stadiums.

The campaign launched with an emotive fan-driven cinematic trailer, highlighting the significant role of technology and apps in bringing fans closer to the game. With Bidstack, OneFootball sought to accelerate this message into new and innovative channels. SPORTFIVE identified gaming as a unique opportunity to extend its reach with typically hard-to-engage Gen Z fans.

Working in partnership with Bidstack and SPORTFIVE, OneFootball utilised virtual stadium environments within fan-favourite football gaming titles as a medium to communicate directly with diverse global audiences. The brand’s messaging and identity were seamlessly blended into gameplay within leading gaming franchises, including Football Manager 2022, Top Eleven, Soccer Cup and Soccer Stars.

Campaign Objectives

OneFootball set out to extend its reach with Gen Z users across new and innovative ad channels. They wanted to increase brand awareness and drive app downloads in some of their key markets, including the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Brazil.

The campaign sought to deliver localised messaging across six languages in each market, ensuring the content remained accessible and relevant. OneFootball set out to engage ‘untameable’ football fans, reaching 16-20-year-olds across both male and female audiences.

53% of OneFootball’s target audience expressed an active interest in gaming, with 43% regularly playing sports-focused gaming titles. With global audiences engaging with video games and related content, on average, three times a day, the medium presented an opportunity to communicate directly and frequently with audiences where they actively choose to spend their time.

As broader entertainment consumption trends have shifted, gaming has continued to experience growth. Consumption amongst Gen Z audiences has increased by around 38% since the pandemic. In contrast to this, mediums such as social media (-21%), television (-7%) and cinema (-11%) have each continued to experience a decline in popularity amongst OneFootball’s target audience.

With this in mind, OneFootball used in-game advertising to complement its broader campaign strategy, delivering highly viewable and engaging creatives in environments that would capture the audience’s full attention.

Campaign Strategy

OneFootball utilised Bidstack’s sophisticated technology to seamlessly deliver localised campaign creatives into leading football titles across various platforms and devices. The partnership ensured that OneFootball remained at the forefront of the player experience, complementing gameplay by delivering placements in environments where audiences have come to expect the presence of advertising.

With the support of Bidstack, OneFootball were able to identify gaming titles that delivered the most relevant audience demographics to achieve the campaign’s objectives. Through Bidstack’s exclusive partnerships with leading games publishers, including Sports Interactive, Nordeus, Miniclip, and Inlogic Games, they were able to connect with audiences at scale in premium and brand-safe environment.

Their campaign creatives were optimised for gaming environments, primarily appearing in the form of animated pitchside banners and utilising advanced geo-targeting and age-gating solutions to ensure that they were delivered in the local language to their clearly defined target audience.

Each creative sported OneFootball’s striking colour palette, with the call to action ‘One App, All the Football. Download Now.’ Focusing on visible branding and a simple call to action ensured that the message was easily digestible, increasing brand awareness and recall amongst audiences whilst simultaneously encouraging a significant uptake in downloads for the app within the target regions.

By activating in-game, OneFootball were able to deliver an ‘always on’ campaign that engaged fans outside of the typical matchday windows associated with football. By utilising virtual stadiums, the campaign offered unrivalled levels of attention among football fan communities while maintaining a strong association with the sport.

Campaign Highlights

OneFootball successfully extended its brand footprint into new environments, delivering an industry-first campaign that engaged global audiences at scale with highly targeted and localised messaging across six key markets.

• OneFootball’s ads were delivered to more than 324k unique players, with over 10 million total impressions viewed by players during their gaming sessions.
• The ads were viewed for more than 88m seconds (equivalent to 1,026 days of gameplay).
• Their in-game creatives remained in view for 8x longer than typical IAB standards.
• The campaign was delivered into Football Manager, an environment known for capturing high levels of attention. The Football Manager ads were seen by 88% of audiences, 1.7x the desktop display norm.
• They delivered an average of 1.95 seconds of viewing time, 1.5x the desktop norm.
• Their in-game ads were equivalent to 1,710 attentive seconds per 1000 impressions, 2.4x the desktop norm.