2014 Gold Best Design or Art Direction

How did the campaign make a difference? This season, The Sun’s fantasy football game Dream Team underwent a mammoth change and included a free twomonth trial of Sun+, a perfect accompaniment for any footy fan.

But how do you get 600,000+ fans to give their credit card details for what was previously a FREE fantasy football game?

By (nicely) calling out fans for their footballing infidelity, The Sun successfully retained existing players and attracted new ones to Dream Team and drove trials of Sun+ and Sun Goals.

The campaign delivered outstanding, over-target results with Sun Goals usage up 678% and an 8:1 ROI.

Strategy The killer campaign insight was that fans are closet cheats. Give them the excuse and they’ll jump at the chance to pick rival players. Last year 69% of Man United fans chose a Man City player – a taboo on the terraces, but an unspoken truth.

Within a strong integrated campaign, each channel played a different role to ensure the right message at the right time.

Press ads created awareness and urgency; emails reminded, educated and incentivised; digital display retargeted and took on hard acquisition; social channels engaged via the hashtag #DTconfessions; inapp messaging reminded and acquired.

Given the short timeframe, the campaign team tracked sign-ups by the hour, identified lulls and responded with media bursts – with planned activity at critical moments such as the Community Shield.

Together these channels provided a successful customer journey united by a distinctive tone of voice.

Creativity The concept ‘It’s not cheating when it’s your Dream Team’ had to be delivered with instant appeal for the nation’s diehard football fans. Disloyal fans are heroed in varying degrees of distress on a psychiatrist’s couch, a confessional booth, a group therapy session. In each scenarios the fan, dressed in their beloved team’s strip, clutches the object of their guilt: a Man United fan cries into a Man City scarf; an Arsenal fan holds up a Spurs scarf in disbelief.

The photographic style captures the tragi-comic ambition of the concept to form beautiful images with attention to lighting, composition and little touches designed to appeal to true fans. A fair amount of copy is neatly presented without imposing on the advert’s overall composition.

A lively typographic creative approach was use in small-space media to bring eye-catching stats to attention, whilst the endline was appropriately framed in a device inspired by a scarf.

Results Social media response to the campaign was immediate and positive – thousands of fans shared their #DTconfessions and grassed up mates for ‘cheating’. It was good-humoured, self-aware fun. And it worked…like a dream.

Positive sentiment outweighed negative by 20:1 in the first week, #DTconfessions trended UK-wide for three consecutive days and the campaign delivered a social reach of 17 million, plus 72,000 engagements, in just 16 days.

The campaign led to 637,000 Dream Team sign-ups – up 6% versus target – including 29% new users and 38% more paying users than targeted, with a potential net worth of £3.3m and a potential annualised net worth of £40m.

Overall, this Dream Team campaign gave an impressive 8:1 ROMI and, most importantly, increased Sun Goals usage by a huge 678%.