Motor racing may have enjoyed a real renaissance with Lewis Hamilton’s performance in F1 but Great Britain already had a reigning motorsport World Champion. The World Touring Car Championships (WTCC) boast bumper to bumper racing, constant overtaking and high speed action, all in everyday cars. The race was really on as FIA World Touring Car Champion for the past two seasons, Brit Andy Priaulx was once again vying for the title, along with compatriots James Thompson and Robert Huff also in the top 10 in the drivers’ standings.
Our objective for this campaign was to raise awareness of the World Touring Car Championship coverage shown exclusively LIVE on British Eurosport – particularly of the British round at Brands Hatch.
The lure of the sport is aided by the fact real, recognisable car models are used such as Seat, BMW, Alfa Romeo and Chevrolet. For a car to participate, at least 2,500 examples of the equivalent, base model road car must have been built in the previous 12 months. We took advantage of this fact by highlighting it to audiences allowing them to associate with the sport by the chance to see the potential of the car sitting in their driveway, albeit with slight modifications!
To achieve maximum results we strapped in top British drivers James Thompson and Robert Huff for radio interviews and ran a separate webTV chat show with World Champion Andy Priaulx, navigating us through the ups and downs of the tour, with behind the scenes footage from the pit and exclusive tales from the fast lane.
The coverage across the broadcast media was extensive with a minimum of 108 UK radio stations running the story. The total audience reached was in excess of 18 million which achieved over 12 hours duration. Stations included Virgin, Heart, LBC, IRN, BBC London, Sky News Radio, and a series of major commercial and local BBC stations. The online coverage with Andy Priaulx amassed an additional audience reach of more than 61million across 26 websites, including The Guardian Unlimited, Metro, Crash.net, MSN Cars, Sportal, The Times online, Tiscali, Virgin Media and Yahoo! Eurosport.
“British Eurosport has used markettiers4dc for a number of years to promote its programming using radio PR, with great results. When the opportunity to use double World Touring Car Champion Andy Priaulx arose to showcase the UK round at Brands Hatch a webchat was proposed to broaden the reach of the campaign and enable him to interact with motorsport fans. It was that interaction, and the slick production, which produced a highly entertaining and effective piece of visual PR, which drove awareness of the series itself and British Eurosport's live coverage.” Matt Horler, Head of Communications, British Eurosport