Sky Media – WickesStarting11

The Project:

To celebrate Father’s Day and the return of Premier League football, Wickes created a dynamic socially-driven advertising campaign broadcast on Sky Sports. Dizplai and Sky Media teamed up to manage, aggregate, and moderate Twitter interaction from football fans looking to nominate their fathers for Wickes’ #WickesStarting11 campaign. Under strict compliancy rules, Dizplai’s moderation team randomly picked the lucky fathers to be included in one of three special half time ads.

The Challenge

Wickes have a strong affiliation and heritage in football with high profile sponsorships over the years, so they were looking to create content that resonated and engaged with fans. The #WickesStarting11 campaign was a chance to interact with viewers during a time of social distancing, to celebrate football and connect families virtually on a special day where families would normally spend quality time together. It was important that all processes, particularly with audience engagement, were compliant and met strict advertising regulations. For the live broadcast, Sky Media needed a reactive and seamless production workflow that would access social, gather and moderate votes, integrate visuals and publish results, in realtime and remotely produced.

How we did it

During pre-production planning Dizplai and Sky Media worked with Wickes to create and finalise the campaign mechanics and creative treatment to ensure a clear process in the delivery of the content. Clarity Application specialists, BGandC and the Sky playout team set up a seamless workflow to enable Diagonal View (Sky Media’s in-house creative team) to create, build and supply all creative assets, while Dizplai was integrated via the cloud to ingest, moderate and integrate the chosen submissions. With all parties set up to work live and deliver assets to playout, the team created a new project on Dizplai to ingest the content from Twitter and start moderating interaction which featured #WickesStarting11 and the @Wickes tag.

With calls-to-action creating a buzz across Twitter, the moderation team used Dizplai to ingest Tweets that included names of the nominated fathers hoping to be included in the the first 11. Each entry was carefully moderated, removing retweets and unsuitable content – including bad language, duplicate votes and bots – then collating valid posts and randomly picking 11 names. Once finalised, the results were published via a data feed to Sky’s playout and composed into the resulting ad content.

The Results

Three live dynamic and socially driven ads were broadcast on Sky Sports during a bumper day of football. With over 2,000 entries in just a six hour window, sports fans and particularly fathers were treated to a public display of affection for Wickes’ campaign. Dizplai and the team remotely collaborated with Sky Media, BGandC, and Diagonal View to select live nominations and produce visually captivating content just minutes prior to broadcast.

Conversation and interaction with Wickes’ Twitter profile was trending with #WickesStarting11 within the top five hashtags during the day. Following calls to action on radio, TV and Social in the build up to the big day of sport, the campaign gave viewers a sense of connection with the brand and their fathers. The lucky winners from across the country, including Sheffield, Wirral and Preston saw their names on the big screens at home – the perfect present for any football loving Dad.