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The call to action for the entire Rider Oath campaign was to drive people to take the oath online through Facebook and affirm their love for the team. Entrusting Casale with the online element of the campaign significantly contributed to the overall success of our strategy. Reg Hamilton Interactive Director

Phoenix Group

CFL heavyweight

Saskatchewan Roughriders

rally fans on field and online

Saskatchewan Roughriders campaign by Phoenix Group hits hard with impressions and engagement

Background The Saskatchewan Roughriders are one of eight teams constituting the Canadian Football League (CFL). Every year, the Roughriders meet sponsorship obligations by conducting an advertising campaign aimed at connecting with fans province-wide and maximizing ticket sales.

Opportunity Ongoing success in the previous years had lifted ticket and merchandise sales to all-time highs, making the usual business goal of increasing sales a redundant strategy; a different approach was needed. Realizing that the club lacked a central data repository for its customers, Phoenix Group, the team’s agency partner, recommended a strategy that would integrate the mass media elements of the annual campaign into a fulfillment mechanism to collect data on new fans.

Phoenix Group and the Riders decided to focus on growing the number of Facebook fans. Due to the large number of existing fans – around 76,000 – there was a significant opportunity to mine this group of people to reach likeminded brand loyalists. A target was set to increase the number of fans to 100,000: if reached, this number of Friends would lay the foundation for a powerful customer database. In addition, the team wanted to continue to lead the league in merchandise sales, fan avidity, and visitors’ game attendance figures.

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The Rider Oath Phrases like, “I will represent my team, my province and my fellow fans with honour and pride,” and “inspire the next generation of the Rider Nation” were used to remind fans to behave accordingly in the stands and set a good example for youngsters, to help keep the atmosphere in the stadium family-friendly.

Solution

Rationale: To appeal to the Riders’ fans’ passion and pride, Phoenix Group created a campaign entitled The Rider Oath. The campaign used radio, TV, out-of-home, and online advertising to entice people to visit the team’s Facebook page (re-skinned for the occasion to reflect the look of all Rider Oath related material) and pledge their allegiance to the green and white.

Implementation: An open casting call was sent out across Saskatchewan and two cameras rolled all day capturing real people, in their personal Rider garb, reciting the oath. The footage was used on the Facebook fan page, where viewers could click “Like” to indicate that they agreed to also take the oath. In return for providing their personal information, each person who made the pledge was entered into a draw to win one of several Roughrider prize packs.

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Online strategy While traditional media pushed people to the Facebook oath page, the online arm of the campaign tapped into Casale Media’s expandable Video Overlay Solution (VOS), allowing users to watch the video and agree to take the oath in a few simple clicks.

Creative: Spawning from an IAB standard display banner, the VOS unit acted as a gateway to the social network’s landing page and featured a large customizable canvas where the best fan videos could be compiled and wrapped in the team’s colours.

Media: Although the team’s core audience of young families generally lives within 150 km of the stadium, the Riders also know from merchandise, shares and other products sales data that its audience extends across generations and geographies. For example, it is in Calgary, in the neighboring province of Alberta, that the highest number of Rider shares is sold.

The target audience for the campaign was therefore defined as male adults aged 18-49, geo-targeted to the province of Saskatchewan and the Albertan cities of Edmonton and Calgary.

Reach: the VOS campaign was supported by an auto-optimized, Run-of-Network campaign using traditional banners, to fully capture the cross-gender, cross-generational aspect of the team’s follower base. To maximize user engagement, re-targeting was also implemented, by serving the ad to whoever had visited the Riders homepage.

Video Overlay

Trigger Ad

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Outcome The integrated campaign produced outstanding results, with the number of Facebook fans increasing by more than 24,500 (for a total of 103,679 by the end of the year). In addition, ticket sales virtually sold out for the year and over 67% of all CFL merchandise sales were Riders products.

For Casale Media’s part:

• Online ads generated almost 20 million impressions, producing more than 85,000 engagements overall (VOS and standard banners indiscriminately counted), an engagement rate almost 5 times higher than average

• The VOS campaign on its own generated thousands of video views, with a click-through rate 15 times the industry average for standard display.

Feedback “The call to action for the entire Rider Oath campaign was to drive people to take the oath online through Facebook and affirm their love for the team. Entrusting Casale with the online element of the campaign significantly contributed to the overall success of our strategy.”

Reg Hamilton

Interactive Director

Phoenix Group

“The Oath Campaign was the first step of an overall corporate initiative to drive people to our CRM system. Casale Media’s ad network, MediaNet, helped us to achieve our goals.”

Ryan Whippler

Director, Communication

Saskatchewan Roughriders