I love this clever campaign from Burger King after they decided to sponsor Stevenage FC in the real world because the team would appear in the computer game Fifa alongside the big teams. So they then created an online challenge to get people to get their own Stevenage team to be brilliant and buy the best players – in other words getting visibility on their brand. What a great idea for a relatively low budget. The whole campaign is wrapped up in a clever social media video.
The bumf says:
Brands pay millions to get soccer’s biggest players to endorse them. But Burger King realized that they didn’t need to do that. A year ago, they found Stevenage F.C. — a team at the bottom of English football’s lowest league — became their sponsors. Because they knew that if their logo was on their jerseys, their logo was going to appear in the biggest soccer videogame in the world: FIFA 20. Alongside DAVID Miami and Madrid, Burger King launched the Stevenage Challenge, where they invited gamers to sign the best players to the Stevenage team, score goals with them, and win free food from BK. Not only did they receive tens of thousands of UCG content with Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi, and Neymar wearing the Burger King logo (without having to pay them a penny), they turned a small team in real life into the biggest team online. “Stevenage Challenge” won five Gold Pencils at The One Show 2020.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
