Leveraging the start of the UEFA Champions League, new UK broadcast rights holder BT Sport created a set of bespoke, hand-painted pub signs to promote the tournament’s kick-off, raise rights awareness and to illustrate the key role football plays in the UK pub industry.
Working with agency OgilvyOne and traditional pub sign artist Andrew Grundon, the signs each blend wordplay and imagery with a twist to pay tribute to some of the stars of European football.
Thus the ‘The Lahm and Flag’ features German captain and Bayern Munich defender Philipp Lahm, ‘The Blue Hart’ depicts <Manchester City goalkeeper Jo Hart, ‘The Bale and Dragon’ refers to Real Madrid attacker Gareth Bale’s Welsh roots, ‘The Bernabeu Arms’ his team’s home stadium, while ‘The Coach And Horses’ portrays Chelsea manager and former Champions League winner Jose Mourinho.
Each of the signs also carry the campaign tagline: ‘Make your pub the home of UEFA Champions League’.
(An additional sign, ‘The Premier Crown’, was also painted to highlight BT Sport’s boosted-up Barclays Premier League coverage.)
The pub signs form the creative core of a campaign that spans PR and press strands and they will also be used as cover-wraps across the trade press and as content creative across the broadcaster’s consumer facing digital media.
Using traditional skills and using the same oil-on-wood approach as authentic pub sign painting, Grundon spent two weeks on each sign.
Each execution is original, while the background shots are of real pubs around London.
‘For the start of the Champions League we needed something that was really going to get noticed by pub landlords,’ explains BT Sport’s head of commercial marketing Jon Crownshaw.
‘Now that it’s exclusive to BT Sport, we had to show how important the competition is to pubs’ midweek trade. These signs did that perfectly, and looked fantastic to boot. The Lahm and Flag is a firm favourite in the office.’
While OgilvyOne EMEA chief creative officers Emma de la Fosse and Charlie Wilson added in a press release that: ‘We wanted to create a campaign which looked at how integral football is to the pub industry. Signs we have developed join a long tradition of wordplay, folklore and intrigue. Combined with modern footballing references, they automatically become fun and engaging for fans and pub landlords.’
Comment
This is certainly a relevant creative idea that displays an understanding of both the consumer, the viewing experience and that B2B target.
It is also refreshing to see a contemporary campaign revolving around traditional, old-school creative skills and craftsman.
Not unlike recent initiatives by Royal Ascot that commissioned both painting (see case study) and tapestry (see case study) to sit at the core of the campaigns’ creative assets.
The Champions League, the world’s most watched annual sports property, is now part of BT’s TV line-up this season after the former state telco beat rival Sky Sports to secure the UEFA rights for the 2015/16 tournament.
The signs are a key pub industry silo of BT Sport’s wider Champions League campaign which was led by a launch commercial called ‘House Party’ featuring a multitude of European football star names (see case study).
and in recent days was supported by a set of fairly vanilla, tournament-themed online films fronted by and/or featuring BT’s new team of football presenters and expert analysts and a slew of current players.
These range from a ‘Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi?’ who’s the greatest player spot,
‘Yaya Toure’s World’s Top 5 Players’,
the ‘Ultimate Champions League Player’.
and ‘The Champions League’s Greatest Atmospheres’.
Links
BT Sport Website:
BT Sport Twitter:
BT Sport Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/btsport
BT Sport Instagram:
BT Sport YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/BTSportOfficial
UEFA Champions League Website:
http://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/
Ogilvy UK:
