New IPL 2020 title sponsor’s wide-ranging activation programme included a Dream11 GIPHY Channel strand which not only generated brand reach and engagement, but also solved some of the social distancing, at-home challenges of a tournament held during a pandemic lockdown by providing fans with a GIF content library of social meme fuel to reflect and share their match-related emotions.
Objectives
In August 2020 the Board of Control for Cricket In India (BCCI) suspended Chinese firm Vivo’s five-year title sponsorship of the IPL over tensions between China and India and existing fantasy league cricket platform partner Dream11 was awarded the title sponsorship for the 2020 tournament just a month before its delayed start in September.
The pandemic forced IPL 2020 to not only be delayed, but also to shift location from India to a bubble in the UAE, while fans in India were understandably reduced to watching/streaming matches from the safety of their homes.
The objective behind White Rivers Media’s ‘Dream11 GIPHY Channel’ – which was just one strand of the title sponsor’s wider activation programme – was to generate social engagement and reach for the brand despite India’s pandemic-driven lockdown.
The aim was to support new title sponsor Dream11’s official IPL assets and above-the-line advertising with an immersive social experience which fans could share with their friends and families while being confided to their homes due to Covid-19 restrictions.
With so many friends and fans forced to watch games apart, the aims of the ‘Dream11 GIPHY Channel’ was to enable them to communicate, celebrate, commiserate and experience match emotions with each other – with the help of their cricket idols in GIF format – and enable to tournament camaraderie, banter and debate to continue to brings communities together despite the challenging conditions.
The campaign’s functional objective was to garner engagement and reach for the title sponsor, but also to boost its brand positioning and values by ensuring that the fans’ communal and conversational IPL experience wasn’t compromised.
Activation
The strategy was not just to socially facilitate the conversations that so many Indian’s have in person during the IPL, but to actually enrich them.
The agency’s response to the brief was to create the ‘Dream11 IPL GIPHY channel’: a publicly accessible repository of more than 200 unique, cricket- and brand-linked GIFs and stickers which could be used by anyone wishing to express a tournament-related emotion or reaction via a mobile phone or via the internet.
The aim was to engage the IPL’s 300m fans by leveraging ‘cricket fever’ via a candid, comic and relatable GIF campaign which created a library of snackable, bite-sized GIFs featuring some of the world’s best players which could be deployed socially to leverage in-game moments from IPL 2020 matches.
The agency’s GIF creation approach was to link its GIFs to both every day and unusually bizarre cricketing micro-moments and to match these relatable funny images with street cricket language and thus generate shareable tournament- and brand-linked memes.
The branded GIFs were designed for and served organically across multiple social platforms led by WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter.
Through the 100s of campaign GIFs and stickers, the tournament’s title sponsor gave fans second screen assets for pre-, in- and post-match social banter.
Outcome
The ‘Dream11 IPL GIPHY Channel’ trended globally twice during the tournament and generated more than 620m views during the 55-day IPL 2020 tournament. #Dream11IPL was the No 1 Google trend in India in 2020 and the No 5 globally.
Amongst the campaign’s other key social success metrics was adding 100,000 new followers to Dream11’s Instagram followers.
All of this was achieved with zero media spend.
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