Brahm of behalf of Littlewoods

The World Cup is always big news for the British public and big business for the brands associated with the beautiful game and so one of the key objectives of this campaign was to ensure that we got the Littlewoods name and key messages across clearly at an extremely competitive time of year. We needed to create a strategy that raised awareness of the new Littlewoods Goal Rush football pools game and that enabled us to drive traffic to the worldcupgames.com website. Littlewoods agency Brahm armed us with some impressive collateral in the form of 1966 World Cup winners Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt as well as a budget for an assortment of signed football merchandise and miniature LCD TVs to ensure you didnt miss a minute of the action!

The strategy therefore was heavily weighted towards speech led tactics in order to make the most of the celebrity involvement although online, offering prize value in combination with the celebrity led WebTV chat show, enabled us to secure more extensive coverage, increase longevity of the coverage and secure more high profile page positioning at an exceptionally competitive time.

The new ‘Goal Rush’ game was aimed predominantly at male football fans aged 25 – 49 years and so a combination of both radio and online was vital in order to reach these groups effectively. Both online and radio could offer mass awareness but online (as opposed to radio, where sports programmes are normally reserved for goal results and live coverage rather than editorial content), we could specifically reach football fans and men of this age by targeting sites who already benefited from a high traffic of these users. The online WebTV show format also gave users a unique opportunity to send in their own questions and have a chance to interact with two of English footballs greatest stars. As well as being broadcast live, the show could also be viewed on demand which is something that gives webTV an advantage over traditional television as a platform. (link to webchats.tv: http://www.webchats.tv/webchat.php?ID=278&past=yes) Interestingly, nearly two-thirds (63%) of UK adults would prefer to watch TV programmes on-demand, rather than via the traditional scheduling model, according to the TV trends Report 2007 conducted by Tiscali.

The Littlewoods Goal Rush campaign secured extensive, targeted and on-message coverage during an extremely competitive time of year with over 85 items of radio coverage encompassing 14 regional BBC stations, BBC Radio 5 Live, and IRN amongst others. The combined weekly reach of the radio element was in excess of 13 million. We also secured coverage on 25 websites including ITV, NTLWorld, The Sun, Virgin.net and FourFourTwo and the WebTV show was also made available as a Podcast from 2 additional sites.