CASE STUDY: Gaming tied to UEFA Euro championships boosts Kia brand recognition

Background

The UEFA European Football Championship (Euro), which was held in Poland and the Ukraine this year, is one of the biggest football events in the world. China has a huge population of football fans, many of whom do not mind getting up 3 am to watch live matches on TV. Kia Motors has been an official partner of Euro since 2008. 

Aims

Innocean is the master agency of Kia and MPG is the media agency of Innocean and Kia. The agency' mission was to develop an interactive platform to provide Chinese consumers with a new way of enjoying Euro 2012 while enhancing Kia's brand recognition and preference in China. 

Executions

Football fans enjoy competing among their friends to correctly predict the outcome of matches. Thus the agencies picked  'prediction' as a keyword for the whole campaign, and developed smartphone game application '投你索好' which is translated as 'bets on what you like'.

Users who downloaded the app were entitled to gamble with a certain amount of virtual coins called S-points. The person who gained the most S-points by the end of final game would win a trip to the home country of the winning Euro team.

In addition, Innocean created the EURO 2012 zone in the 62 Kia showrooms in China, enabling visitors to obtain both S-points and Euro 2012 souveniers by registering for a test-drive.

Consumers were also invited to gain S-points by scanning a QR code and by sharing game-related posts on Weibo. 

In order to arouse more buzz, the agencies 'brought back' Paul, the octopus who gained overnight global fame in 2010 by 'predicting' the outcome of matches at the World Cup in South Africa.

Kia Motors 'appointed' Paul as a special advisor and opened an account for him in Weibo to allow real-time communication. The agencies also made a series of online videos, in which Paul predicted the results of each match one day in advance and received either a prize or a punishment depending on his accuracy. To cover all the potential scenarios, the agencies actually had to film more than 70 clips—far more than they actually released. 

Paul promised his fans that he would dash out to the street and dance if his Weibo reached more than 20,000 followers, which it did. Paul's daytime "shuffle dance" in Shanghai got media attention and appeared on TV sports news as well as in nationwide newspapers.

Results

• During the five weeks of the campaign, more than 800,000 people downloaded the app, with more than 2.5 million page views.
• About 850,000 people visited showrooms and other event sites in about 50 different cities all over China, and about 300 people ordered cars on event sites.
• The “Paul is Back” video series was viewed more than 3.2 million times in Youku and Tudou.
• Paul’s Weibo earned more than 48,000 followers and his posts were viewed by more than 18 million Weibo users in total.
• A Mr. Jing won the contest and a trip to Spain.