Insight
Nike’s affiliation with Argentinian football club Boca Juniors dates back 18 years, to 1996. Boca plays every match as if it was the very first or very last game. Their style, their gameplay, their attitude is a display of skill and dedication. No matter how many times they have won, no matter how many trophies they have.
PHD’s challenge was to raise the excitement levels amongst fatigued Boca fans about ANOTHER new first team kit launch. With a retail value of $95, it also wanted fans to opt for a genuine shirt, in a relatively poor country where $20 knock offs are more prevalent.
Strategy
The agency’s media approach to this challenge was inspired by an Argentine football tradition where rookie players have their heads shaved for their first match in the shirt to demonstrate their allegiance to the club – creating, quite literally - a clean start, to demonstrate that players play every match as if it was the first. So, it decided to use media to create a high-profile clean start for the team’s star player in the run up to Boca’s first game in the new kit.
Execution
To launch the new kit, Juan Burrito "The Mule" Martinez – Boca’s star forward – made a grand, high-profile media gesture. He made a clean start on Twitter and deleted all of his 92,112 followers so that he could win them back one match at a time by proving his passion for the club whilst wearing the shirt. In his first Tweet, Martinez declared - "Today I erased my 92,112 followers with the idea of winning them back by playing every match as if it were my first."
PHD implemented a strategic approach of organic and promoted Tweets for Martinez and soon they had attracted significant coverage from local and international media – adding monumental added value to the campaign. The noise created around the campaign by celebrities, the media and Boca’s proud fan base “the Bosteros” created a buzz for the new shirt that not only met the objective of raising excitement around the launch of the new shirt, but also scored outstanding results with a total investment of only $8,000…
Results
“Burrito” Martinez saw his followers increase by 40% to 130,000, and to reach these 'new' followers, Nike sent a special 10% discount offer on the new shirt, directly selling an additional 1,500 shirts through Twitter.
This means the 'clean slate' Twitter stunt delivered a sales return of $16.98 for every $1 spent and turned out to be one of Nike’s top investments with an ROI of 1,840%.
By cleverly using media to demonstrate that Nike is as passionate now as it was 18 years ago, it delivered record shirt sales and re-engaged with one of the most passionate fan-bases in the world.