Littlewoods GAA - Paid Social Case Study

TESTIMONIAL

“The 2020 Hurling Championship posed both challenges and opportunities for Littlewoods Ireland. With fans watching the games from home we looked to create some match day excitement through social. Together with Wolfgang we devised a strategy that engaged these fans through interactive ad formats, our fun AR filter and reactive paid content. This allowed us to be at the heart of Hurling conversations on social, and led our campaign hashtag, #StyleOfPlay to trend numerous times throughout the Championship- including on All-Ireland Final day! With so many brands and sponsors in the GAA space fighting for the same audience at this time, it was really exciting to see our campaign garner that sought after attention and engagement, and generate real business results for Littlewoods Ireland.”

Pippa Doyle, Sponsorship Lead

CHANNELS

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

KEY RESULT

163% increase in Engagement Rate YoY

WOLFGANG DIGEST

Utilised new ad formats to drive more meaningful social media engagements in the lead-up to the All-Ireland Final in the wake of Covid-19 shutting stadiums.

OUR STRATEGY

The mission for social became clear- We needed to shift those exciting in-person match day experiences onto people’s social media feeds. We still needed to reach everyone in Ireland with Littlewood’s usual great GAA sponsorship content, but this time we needed to dig deeper and get more people actively involved in the hurling conversation online. To do this, we planned to use some innovative ad formats to get people talking and sharing their own user-generated content. These digital interactions from hurling fans would not only replace the excitement of being sat in croke park, but turn it into content which we could amplify to thousands.

Here’s how we went about achieving this:

We created a number of conversational tweets which were primarily promoted before and on match days. These ads function like a poll, but responses are automatically retweeted onto the user’s own page.
We worked with Littlewoods and our own Wolfgang Creative team to build a custom AR filter. This filter was created with All-Ireland Final day in mind, allowing people to celebrate the team they are cheering for.
On top of these two new innovations, we promoted Littlewood’s usual video content across all social channels and used some other ad types like poll ads, carousel ads and reactive tweets. These all worked to increase the campaign’s reach and drive more engagement.
In order to connect with Hurling fans on a more personal level, we whitelisted two popular GAA stars on Twitter which allowed us to run paid ads from their accounts.

BUSINESS GROWTH

The campaign was a huge success, driving a 163% stronger engagement rate than in the previous year (without a pandemic)! #StyleOfPlay trended for a combined total of 24 hours throughout the campaign, peaking at #1 on All-Ireland Final match day. This was a first for Littlewoods!

The AR filter achieved an engagement rate of 7% which was 233% above the campaign average.

+163%

YoY Engagement Rate

#1

Trend in Ireland

7%

AR Filter Engagement

Digitising The ‘Match Day Buzz’

How we helped Littlewoods Ireland replicate the buzz of the All-Ireland Hurling Final without 82,000 bums on seats in Croke Park