JD Sports team up with FourFourTwo - the world's biggest football magazine to spark debate, online noise and print standout.
JD Sports marketing strategy is to position itself away from competitors to give it competitive advantage. This means that high profile manufacturers and brands will prefer to release their products to JD rather than its competitors as they are likely to sell more products and protect the brand's positioning. Their advertising focuses on high circulation titles, so as the market leading football title FourFourTwo was a natural fit. The FFT Top 100 generates a huge amount of interest and extends beyond print to digital and social which was vital to JD's campaign objectives.
JD Sports wanted to reach a sports orientated audience who were actively interested in football, debate and buying related products. As well as demanding a market leading print presence they wanted to create 'online noise' via social media. In recent years, the UK retail industry has faced challenging conditions. However, against this tough economic backdrop, JD has managed to maintain growth through a thorough understanding of market opportunities. By teaming up with FFT they were able to accurately target an engaged audience at exactly the right time.
JD Sports sponsored all of the digital elements of 2013's Top 100, launched on 27th November
They featured on every page view generated, with their branding integrated into our logos and infographics, as well as ensuring JD ads framed every piece of Top100 content for the duration of the partnership.
Over 3 weeks (27th Nov - 19th Dec) the activity achieved a staggering 564,451 page views, with 513,100 of them being unique page views - the activity also achieve 5,405 shares. The flagship Ronaldo #1 article achieved 14,891 page views and was shared 1,100 times. This was the most shared Top100 ever, with over 324k accounts reached with #FFT100 hashtag. Tweets referencing sponsor account @Jdsportsfashion saw 169 tweets & retweets 1.5 million ad Impressions were served for JD also, equating to an approx value of £35k, with 2,900 clicks recorded (average CTR of 0.22%).
The results for this sponsorship far exceeded the client's expectations - which grows to prove that with the right partnership brands can harness the power of a media title to their advantage. In just three weeks the activity achieved over half a million page views and over 5,000 shares , with the #FFT100 hashtag trending across twitter.