Case Study
Football Manager 2021 launch on Twitter enthralls fans and gamers across Europe
Key Results
2M
video views in the UK
24%
increase in positive sentiment
14.9M
impressions of Promoted Trend Spotlight in France
The opportunity:
For the launch of the 2021 iteration of the @FootballManager video game, the studio behind it — Sports Interactive (@SIgames) — was keen to stoke anticipation and drive demand for the game among football and video game fans. Wanting to create extensive awareness of the launch on social media across multiple European markets, it turned to Twitter to engage a wide audience through premium advertising formats.
The strategy:
Together with full-service video game marketing agency ComboStrike (@ComboStrikeHQ) and TwitterNext, @SIgames devised a multilayered campaign to launch Football Manager 2021 across select European markets.
By harnessing the Promoted Trend Spotlight, which puts brands front and centre on the Explore tab, @SIgames ensured its target audience of committed fans in the British, French, and German markets would be aware of its launch on #FM21ReleaseDay.
It married that trend with a Twitter emoji for greater impact and produced a stream of content in different formats to support the trend and drive engagement. These included multilingual video, articles, and Twitter Polls.
To further engage the opinionated football gaming community in a smart way across the launch day, @FootballManager asked users, “What is your management style?”. It then used artificial intelligence technology to respond to their answers and let them know if they would be a good fit as a club manager.
Keen to improve brand performance in Norway, @SIgames made the most of First View there. This enabled it to showcase video in the top advertising position in people’s Twitter timeline for 24 hours, allowing maximum reach when the target audience was most receptive.
01
Capture attention with Promoted Trend Spotlight.
Coupling relevant content with Promoted Trend Spotlight, which sits atop the Explore tab on Twitter, @SIgames sparked the interest of football fans and gamers in the UK, France, and Germany.
02
Create amazing conversations with interactive Tweets.
To supercharge conversation and engagement with its committed audience of fans, @SIgames used IBM Watson AI technology to respond to users who answered questions posed by @FootballManager during the campaign.
03
Boost brand awareness with First View.
Keen to improve awareness of Football Manager 2021 in Norway in particular, @SIgames ran a market-specific First View campaign during the post-launch Lunar New Year sale — a gaming calendar fixture.
The results
This lively campaign proved compelling for fans, generating thousands of mentions, Retweets, and conversations.
In the UK, it achieved 2M video views and an engagement rate of 3.1% with its AI-powered Tweet conversation. In France the Promoted Trend Spotlight saw 14.9M impressions, while across Germany on launch day there were 2,700 uses of #FM21ReleaseDay. The Norwegian First View campaign, meanwhile, saw 267,000 Tweet impressions and 1,700 mentions of @FootballManager.
Twitter has been a vital platform for the continued success of Football Manager, enabling us to communicate directly with consumers. The outside-the-box ideas, unique audience insights, and brand research from the team at Twitter lead to really well targeted, cost-effective, noticeable campaigns.
Solutions Used
Audience targeting
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Expanding reach
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