Challenge

ASB, a major New Zealand bank, found that people were indifferent to yet another bank sponsorship of a sports event. How could ASB’s sponsorship of the ASB Classic, a WTA tournament event, get attention and attract a whole new audience to tennis?

Strategy

Most sponsorships are just “proud to be” associations. Our strategy was to go deeper – not just bring you the game, but create an entirely new twist on it that would be shared beyond tennis lovers, culminating in famous players and top tier titles sharing our branded content.

Execution

Dogs as ball boys! The insight that no one loves tennis balls more than dogs resulted in ‘The ‘Best Ball Boys in the World’ video of Venus Williams taking on Svetlana Kuznetsova in an exhibition match featuring cute, loveable and highly trained dogs. Venus Williams was a well-known dog lover, which showed in this very human and lovable piece.

Outcome

‘The Best Ball Boys in the World’ quickly grabbed global media attention and got both tennis and non-tennis fans fondly talking about ASB, tennis and cute dogs.

To date the video has earned more than 4.8 million views.

Media coverage was secured with outlets such as Mashable, USA Today, Good Morning America and Britain’s Daily Mail with a minimum combined audience of 750 million unique browsers per month.

“You’ve done so much for tennis. There aren’t that many sponsors that really get it – and you guys do.”

-Venus Williams

Convention says if you mess with your logo, you risk brand recognition and ultimately, consideration. In the face of convention we turned our logo into the ultimate signal of our commitment to the All Blacks:

Overnight, across the country, we rebranded our branches.

Under the cover of darkness we changed our brand logos on bank branches and social channels across the country from ASB to ‘ABS’.

Which sparked feverish debate in social channels:

People began to speculate if this was an intentional play or an unfortunate marketing ‘fail’.

After days of speculation the All Blacks players themselves revealed our partnership:

We launched a video that saw key All Black players take creative licence with the ASB brand letters transposing them to form “ABS”. This became a news story in itself, with the video airing during the main TV news broadcast and giving us 2 minutes of coverage.

The 'Best Ball Boys in the World' video received nearly 5 million worldwide views online, gaining awareness and comment from a wide global audience - well beyond traditional tennis fans. It set a record for ASB social media engagement, with activity continuing in the days and weeks after the event had finished.

Media coverage was secured with outlets such as Mashable, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, Good Morning America, ESPN and Britain’s Daily Mail with a minimum combined audience of 750 million unique browsers per month.

Dog lover Venus Williams shared the piece with her 1.2 million Twitter followers and remarked in a post final match interview, “You’ve done so much for tennis (ASB). There aren’t that many sponsors that really get it – and you guys do.”

Clearly 'The Best Ball Boys in the World' video had a strong positive impact on the brand, with brand love increasing 11 points to its highest score of 144 in Auckland, as well as a 6 point increase across New Zealand to a record high of 84.