Every year Play Sports needs to build up anticipation for the new ‘Jupiler Pro League’ football season. It’s the most important sales moment of the year and in 2020 sales were down by 42% due to the corona crisis and lots of games being cancelled. Making this campaign the most ‘important’ start-of-season campaign in Play Sports history. So, we needed to do things differently this year so we could generate more impact than ever and reclaim our spot as the n1 sports channel in Belgium.

When you are building up anticipation for a new sports season, the convention is to use footage from the past season. But what really builds anticipation is making people dream about what’s going to happen in the new season: crazy goals, aggressive tackles, the first goal of your favorite player. We wanted to raise interest for the upcoming season by showing these moments, or even better, by not showing them.

In the first phase, we put up Placeholder Ads that clearly defined specific moments in football games. For example; the first goal scored by Antwerp, the most beautiful assist of the weekend, the foulest tackle, craziest save and so on.

We did this in the streets on billboards in different sizes plus special build posters and digital mobile billboards. On top of that, we also created ‘empty ads’ in other (online) media like display advertising, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, television, and radio.

Once that specific moment took place, a team was ready to replace the placeholder ad with the exact footage.

The campaigned proved to be efficient. It was Play Sport’s most successful start-of-season campaign of the last five years. New subscriptions on Play Sports went up with +353% compared to last season’s opening weekend. On top of that our ads were picked up by press and public, resulting in a lot of earned media both in press as on social media.