2021 Silver Sports

Agency: Wunderman Thompson UK

Client: BT Sport

Campaign Name: The Unseen Stats

Campaign Overview

Society - and sport - reached a tipping point in the battle against inequality during the pandemic. BT's brand mission is to Connect for Good, so it wanted to use the platform to lead the fight against online abuse.

Strategy

Sport is data. Today's game is dominated by stats, facts and figures. BT Sport therefore chose to use data to wake up a nation to the online abuse epidemic.

While players performed on the pitch, their social feeds - and those of the fans and public - were being filled with hate. This was a movement for change.

Inspired by the theory of political activism, the brand based its strategy around the Agitate, Educate and Affiliate model - used by everyone from the Black Panthers to Barack Obama.

Working with online abuse charity, Glitch, and its founder Seyi Akiwowo, the broadcaster would establish a credible, authentic voice

Creativity

By combining proprietary AI, quantitative and qualitative research, BT Sport unearthed ‘The Unseen Stats’: facts to quantify the true scale of the online abuse problem in the UK.

Using manually crafted natural language detection they sought to catalogue offensive tweets, and probabilistic and heuristic models then inferred whether the tweet poster was a troll.

Other forms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis extracted emojis, handles, hashtags, swear words and sentiment.

In total, over 200,000 different data points were analysed, evaluated and distilled.

The campaign then moved up a gear to:

• Agitate - dropping The Unseen Stats in social, digital, OOH and on BT Sport

• Educate - with Glitch, BT Sport created educational online and social content

• Affiliate - alongside Glitch, it devised the CTA, ’Spot. Report. Support’ -a simple but powerful message displayed everywhere from social to stadium perimeter boards

Finally, the Black and White Paper launched, a 78-page dossier containing the mission, methodology and The Unseen Stats.

It was sent to 100,000 BT staff and used to define the firm’s new anti-online abuse policy.

Results

The Unseen Stats fuelled a national conversation around online hate, bringing the sheer scale of the problem to light for the first time. Campaign impact to date:

• 500 pieces of online abuse actively reported or removed on BT social channels

• 25% reduction in online abuse tracked on Twitter via an Abuse Tracker, over launch weekend

• £800,000 earned media generated

• 485 pieces of press coverage

• 5m print circulation reached

• 500,000 Tweets tracked and categorised

During each home nations game in Euro 2020, one abusive tweet every three seconds was tracked and reported.

This was subsequently used to inform and define BT's new anti-online abuse policy - with its social media teams proactively tracking, deleting, blocking and reporting abuse on their channels.

BT Sport continues to work alongside Glitch to influence Government policy.

The Team

Wunderman Thompson UK - Steve Aldridge, Chief Creative Officer - Matt Steward, Chief Client Officer - Andy Lane, Managing Partner - Christophe McKee, Creative Director - Richard Morgan, Creative Director - Sam Huckle, Creative - Josh Baggott, Creative - Tyler Hendy, Designer - Natalie Wilson, Account Director - Phil Watson, Business Director - Nick Firth, Artworker - Paul Grainger, Head of Studio - Hanna Apperley, Delivery Director - James Wilson, Project Director - Rebecca Pinn, Senior Strategist - Sid McGrath, Chief Strategy Officer - Mariana Lima, CRM Partner - Steven Richards, Data Partner - Jane Evans, Senior Data Strategy