In a grand generalisation, shopping isn’t high on most men’s agendas. But football is. We created a look and feel which resonated with die-hard football fans, but also reflected the Barclaycard visual identity – clean, with lots of white space. We did not see these two design requirements as being in harmony with one another and therefore a solution that satisfied both was imperative to the challenge. The design needed to feel inspirational and fresh, but with a close eye on functionality in helping to guide users through the site – in order to maximise the number of users playing and completing.

The idea was rooted in the product: Bespoke Offers matches people with products they actually want, based on transactional data that only Barclays can see. As a metaphor for that, My Player Twin matches you with the Premiership player you look most like. Football fans were already familiar with Barclays sponsorship of the Premier League. This was a natural extension of that. Owned media (pitchside LEDs and ads in match-day programmes) worked alongside a paid and organic seeding strategy targeting sports blogs and forums, sports shows, and tech websites, as well as Twitter and Facebook posts and dark posts.

The campaign was so successful people played it again and again. Average well time was nearly six minutes – and unsubscribe rates to the offers emails exceptionally low at 0.64%. We created over 113,000 new customers for Barclaycard and attracted more than 372,000 unique visitors in just four weeks – meaning awareness was high and conversion was over 30%.

• Page views: 1.99m

• Average page views per visit: 4.12

• Visits: 484,000

• Average time on site per visit: 5m 45 seconds

• Average daily visitors: 9.56K

• Mobile visit (mobile+tablets) rate: 36.24%

• Unique visitors: 372K

• Registered users: 113K

• On average visitors took part three times.