The Brief

State of Origin is an annual rugby league series in Australia between Queensland and New South Wales (NSW). It is widely considered the country’s greatest sporting rivalry. GIO Insurance are official sponsors of the NSW team, which gives them direct access to the players. And the people of NSW, comprising GIO’s existing and potential customers, are passionate fans of the team who represent them. This despite Queensland having dominated recently, winning 8 out of 9 times. So to inspire the players ahead of the 2015 series we used that sponsorship to connect them more personally with their unwavering fanbase. To do this we created Fuel the Fire; a campaign using Facebook and Twitter directly targeting NSW fans. We gave them the chance to send GIO their messages of support, which would be crafted into a single team talk, delivered on their behalf to the NSW players at the team announcement.

Creative Execution

WHERE: Our Fuel the Fire campaign targeted NSW rugby league fans primarily on Facebook and Twitter, the main social hubs for Origin conversations. All content originated on the GIO pages, before being shared by the NSW Blues and Triple M (media partner). Every piece of content featured a call to action, asking fans to send in their #FueltheFire messages or watch and share our content. This was supported by advertising on the GIO, NSW Blues and Triple M websites, plus radio ads on Triple M, all of which featured the same calls to action. WHEN: Our campaign ran to plan, launching on May 5th, two weeks out from the NSW team announcement. This was led by a video calling on fans to send us their motivational messages for the team. The campaign concluded on May 27th, when our team talk video was played at the stadium before Game 1.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our target audience was NSW rugby league fans, who are extremely engaged with State of Origin. This includes existing or prospective GIO customers, i.e. people with other insurers or young adults looking for their first insurer. As an insurance brand, GIO has an extremely functional relationship with its customers for the most part. Their sponsorship of the NSW team gives them a platform to interact with existing and prospective customers in a more emotional way. Our campaign did this by connecting GIO directly with NSW fans - with the promise of connecting them directly with the NSW team they love.

Results

By using its sponsorship of the NSW team to directly connect with the team’s fans in a meaningful way, GIO achieved their most highly-engaged, socially-driven campaign ever with Fuel the Fire. This drove significant scale and visibility among the target audience: • 2.36 million total impressions • 47k cumulative unique users • Over 1,000 unique fan speeches written, in just 10 days • 160.9% increase in engagement rate • 368% increase in content share rate • 194k total video views • $0.01 cost per view based on $1,200 spend • 1030% increase in GIO organic impressions This success was driven by the vast amount of tagging and sharing that happened. In fact, almost 60% of the impressions came from this type of reach. People who would normally never interact with or share an insurance brand’s content had willingly done so, creating awareness or consideration for GIO among thousands of potential new customers.