Our Work / Betfair Front Room

‘ONE ROOM, 5 FANS, £100 EACH’

With those immortal words, the irrepressible Danny Baker launched our Front Room campaign for Betfair.

Charting the ebbs and flows, the ups and the downs, the lefts and the rights (I’ll stop torturing this now…) of the 2009/10 football season, the Front Room was Betfair’s most ambitious marketing undertaking to date.

As Danny’s sound bite would suggest, we got 5 real football fans in a room, every week through the season, and then filmed them bantering, arguing with each other about the week’s football fixtures, and ultimately agreeing to disagree by shaking on a bet.

So in a bid to dramatise Betfair’s ‘Fan v Fan’ betting proposition, we created this microcosm of the Betfair betting exchange where punters go online and bet directly against each other.

But a week is a lifetime in football, so we knew we had to make sure our 5 fans were always talking about the same live issues that fans themselves would be. That meant shooting every Wednesday evening (normally after a Champions League game), editing on the Thursday and playing out on the Friday of the same week, so we’d be on air during the Saturday game and also have posted a wealth of content online (which would have never made it onto TV…)

We all approached the whole concept with real journalistic intent, to get content that was as topical, relevant and entertaining as possible. It was a monumental effort from the team, not in the least because we had to adopt a super-fast-track way of working with the broadcasters and Clearcast – and keep it going for 9 whole months. No easy task. We even built the ‘Front Room’ down in Betfair’s offices in Hammersmith where we filmed our fans – unscripted – week in, week out.

We ended up with just shy of 60 TV commercials which aired on Sky, ESPN and ITV. We produced more than 100 pieces of content which were housed online at BetfairFootball.com, where our 5 fans also blogged and Tweeted their way through the season, encouraging punters to take them on.

And after all that hard work, we’ve seen some fantastic results. The Betfair Front Room:

• Helped to position Betfair as a brand with real presence on match-days.
• Drove a positive emotional response to the brand.
• Generated a 50% uplift in registrations to Betfair than over the same time period the previous year.
• Boosted on-site activity and – critically – increased the number of funded accounts during the period of activity.
• A big well done to all the team (as you can imagine, over 9 months there were a fair few people involved) and to the team at Betfair who kept momentum going over such a long time period.

Tagged as: Betfair, football, Integrated, Online, TV