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Challenge

For football fans, June is the worst. While others are celebrating the start of summer, they’re mourning the end of the season and the long wait till August. BT isn’t celebrating either. Having invested heavily in Premier League and UEFA Champions League rights over the years, it has drawn fans’ attention and custom – 84% of its subscriber base, in fact. Then, every year in June, they cancel in their droves. Because, no football to watch. But BT Sport has authority and credibility in wider sports broadcasting, iconic talent across its pundit roster and a trademark fan-to-fan approach. There’s a lot more to BT Sport than football.

BT tasked AnalogFolk London with increasing value perception and satisfaction (and so preventing churn) by driving fandom in its other sports rights.

Solution

As fans ourselves, we know sports fandom is years in the making. It’s basically written in our DNA. We also know fandom is about the stories behind our teams and players. And sports fans may have already decided they hate other sports. MotoGP? Nah, not for me. So, while we knew it’s near-impossible to create fandom overnight, it’s through human stories that we’d spark interest in the niche sports football fans might usually dismiss. We needed to find another angle on MotoGP.

We wanted to match BT Sport’s credibility from day one, so we brought respected sports journalists into the AnalogFolk Editorial Team. They find the stories that will make our content fly.

As BT’s content and engagement agency of record, we’re working with the brand on a good-to-great transformation from acquisition-centric to truly customer focused. We’re leading the development of a brand-wide editorial framework to give a common voice and purpose to everything BT says to its customers.

Activity

My Sport DNA is an emotive, disruptive film series that uncovers and showcases inspiring backstories from stars of lesser-known sports. We identified heroes of tennis, boxing, hockey, MotoGP and Speedway, and celebrated their sometimes heartwarming, sometimes harrowing journeys to success. Our relationships with them meant we could gain amazing access to their private archives. Teasers to the films were delivered via SportFix, the popular weekly email programme we manage for BT Sport.

Result

My Sport DNA was just one example of exclusive content we created for the SportFix email programme; we regularly interviewed sports stars. Exclusive content gives the audience a reason to believe in BT Sport and a reason to open and engage with our email.

Since taking on the project in January 2017, we have increased average open rates from 25% to upwards of 60%.

It’s not just the email audience that appreciates our work; soundbites from our film and written interviews are organically picked up by global news outlets. Hello, even more credibility for BT Sport.