Premier Sports showcased the eagerly anticipated return of international rugby to the northern hemisphere stage. Specifically targeting the Asian markets, which lead to the formation of a new arm to Premier Sports. Premier Sports Asia.
Digital Playmakers were tasked with taking this new brand/product to market via a series of performance marketing campaigns across social and search.
After significant market research was undertaken, the challenges became evident. Rugby is a small sport in comparison to the likes of football and NFL, therefore audience size and accessibility to that audience was an initial challenge.
The second challenge was marketing this product in English to Asian markets. The number of english speakers in foreign markets is growing, however this is very much a developing skillset and consequently meant excluding a large proportion of Asian rugby fans based on language preferences.
The final challenge was internal, within Facebooks advertising platform itself, micro-targeting. With recent consolidations in its algorithm and interest based targeting, it has become noticeable that Facebook is prioritising size and simplicity over quality and complexity.
Digital Playmakers delivered an extremely effective go-to-market strategy. Successfully delivering high volumes of conversions at a low cost-per-acquisition.
Marketing to the entirety of Asia meant that optimisations had to be cutthroat. It also became evident that industry threats were effecting certain demographics and that illegal streaming remains ever present in todays society.
With decreased CPM’s across all advertising platforms, the cost of going to market throughout the global recession was almost halved! The pandemic, for once, was in-fact highly beneficial. Reinforcing this statement is that OTT and SVOD has become the cornerstone of many peoples entertainment throughout the global crisis and this has been accurately reflected via the results of our performance marketing campaigns throughout this period.
