Description
AGENCY: IDN Norway
CLIENT NAME: Ullavaal Stadion (Norway’s national football arena)
BRIEF
Due to poor results the Norwegian national football team has been struggling with decreasing ticket sales in recent years. The Norwegian national football arena, Ullevaal Stadion, therefore wanted to encourage the away supporters to buy tickets for the friendly international game Norway-Sweden on June 8th 2015. The objective was to take advantage of the strong rivalry between Norwegians and Swedes in order to create an electric atmosphere for the game and fill up the stadium. NXT/A2N was challenged with the task to sell 1.000 tickets to Swedish away supporters.
STRATEGY
Target audience: Swedes living in the Oslo region, typically men and women in the age of 20-35 years.
Creative strategy: It was crucial that we talked to our audience in a relevant manner. A strong visual identity reinforced the patriotic commitment and urged Swedes in Oslo to support their team. All communication was in Swedish so they instantly would know that we addressed only Swedish supporters. We also used Sweden’s biggest star Zlatan Ibrahimovic in our communication: “Come and support Zlatan & Co! June 8th at 20.00 on Ullevaal Stadion. Ticket price only 100 kr. Click here for tickets.”
Media strategy/execution: We chose to use Facebook Ads, which were carefully targeted to Swedes in the Oslo area + their Facebook friends. Most preferably, Swedes in Oslo who liked football and/or Sweden’s biggest star Zlatan Ibrahimovic. We used Fanbooster’s Facebook targeting setup to make the targeting as fine grained as possible and published several posts and focused the ads budget on the best-performing ads, adjusting along the way based on results.” Ullevaal Stadion originally wanted us to start the advertising 1 week before the game, but luckily we persuaded them to start 3 weeks before the game.
RESULTS
It was a huge success! Already after first week the target of 1.000 tickets was reached. The arena had to open more sections for Swedish supporters and when the campaign ended a total of 2.340 tickets was sold to swedes directly from Facebook Ads.
• 10 % of all swedes identified on Facebook bought a ticket through our ads!
• We only used 80 % of the spending budget – which was limited to only EUR 2.750 in the first place.
• The campaign created massive engagement among Swedish fans on Facebook.
• The arena was completely sold out before game-day (Max. capacity: 27.000 spectators).
CAMPAIGN ELEMENTS
• Targeted Facebook Ads (several versions for optimized communication)
• Unique tracking link to Billettservice/Ticketmaster (the official ticket sales channel)
RESOURCES