The Cheltenham Festival is the highlight of the horse racing calendar and a key time for bookmakers. As a result, it’s a time of intense advertising activity. In such a competitive – and expensive – advertising environment, it’s a huge challenge to stand out from the crowd, so finding the most effective media channel to ensure your message gets seen is crucial. Online, in particular social media, has become a key battleground for this.
In this online arena we can talk directly (and at a much lower cost) to savvy punters who are clued-up on where to get the best odds and who are prone to switching frequently between bookmakers. By staying at the forefront of their minds in the social media space, we have more chance of Coral being their choice for when they place that bet.
Taking this approach also gave us the opportunity to create an idea that would be interactive, engaging, fun and sharable. One that won’t just wash over consumers, but would have that “X-factor” to make Coral famous during Cheltenham.
And so the #CheltenHAM Festival of Micro Pig Racing was born! We created a four-day spectacle that mirrored Cheltenham proper in every way except for one detail: we created races with cute, on-trend, adorable micro pigs, not horses.
With an innovative use of Twitter’s new video function, we flipped Cheltenham on its head and turned Coral’s Twitter page into a live micro pig racing channel for the duration of the festival. We released the main daily race at 1pm each day, with all posts in advance of that geared towards getting as many people to tune in as possible.
Additional shorter highlights videos and Vines were posted across Coral’s other social media channels, supported by posts and photos to generate greater campaign presence and reach. Promoted posts on Twitter again also helped boost our campaign to a bigger audience.
The resulting #CheltenHAM content proved to be just the right mix of fun and playfulness, delivering Coral’s most successful Cheltenham festival to date. We even ended up appearing on the BBC One Show.
We achieved the highest visibility on social media of all the bookmakers (measured by “share of voice”) at 28%. Much of this visibility was due to consumers seeing shared content as opposed to seeing promoted posts, with analysis showing that 50% of the related conversation around @Coral was truly organic, proving the idea had the viral factor.
We also exceeded all our other key targets, achieving an increase of 478% in site visits to coral.co.uk coming via social media, a 95% increase in bets placed on mobile and, significantly, a 60% year-on-year increase in total bets placed.
In what is a fairly staid and formulaic tradition of advertising around Cheltenham (namely the tried and tested recipe of either stunts or serious horse racing matters) we really wanted to create a warm, light-hearted piece that stood out from the usual bookmaker marketing melee.
We made our modest budget a virtue and took the brave route away from slick broadcast advertising, purposefully making the videos rough and ready with a fun and charming feel. We also showed that you don’t need to spend a TV-sized advertising budget to beat the competition.
… and people loved it. Not only did they share and engage with the campaign prodigiously, but we scored 89% positive brand sentiment.
These results and huge reach were achieved with a micro pig-sized budget, proving that pigs truly can fly!
Jason Nicholas is managing partner at Space
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