Vodafone, ‘Shoot and score’
‘Shoot and score’, an oldie but a goodie
It was Vodafone’s second season as sponsor of the UEFA Champions League. How do they strengthen their position as a brand that understands football’s emotional cartwheels?
They wanted to use the mobile channel to get more from their investment in the sport. This was early days of mobile - pre-iPhone, even. Everyone took their phone along to a match, using it before, during and after the game, joking with their pals, taking snaps and checking other match results.
How could we use this ubiquity of mobile at matches and focus on the Vodafone core brand value, ‘Make the most of now’?
The challenge was to engage fans in the moment, forcing them to pull their mobile out of their pocket and act, tightening the emotional bond between football, fans and Vodafone.
In this innovative promotion, for fans at UK stadia at Champions League matches during the 07/08 season, a display invited you to use your phone to take a shot at a goalie between the sticks, ready for a penalty. Take a snap, send it to a shortcode and find out if you’ve beat the keeper.
We used (at the time) cutting-edge image recognition software to work out where you’ve shot the ball. Then, with an algorithm based on the average penalty save stats for keepers who’d played in the UEFA Champions League final in the last 10 years, we worked out if you’d scored or not.
A link SMS’d back to you sent you to the result, showing a dynamically generated image of where you placed the ball, and whether the keeper was able to keep you out.
With it’s use of image recognition and generative imagery, this activity caused a big stir at the time. It also won a D&AD Graphite Pencil, and ‘Best creativity in Mobile Marketing‘ and ‘Most innovative use of technology in Mobile Marketing’ at the UK Mobile Marketing Awards.
Credits
Agency: Nokia Interactive Advertising
Creative Direction: Mark Freeman & Tim Ash
Art Direction: Chris Constantine
Technical Direction: Brendan Moore
Photogaphy: Andy Cantillon
Artworker: Duncan Munge
Copywriter: Amie Nolan
Technology Partner: Anthony Ashbrook, Mobile Acuity