Fast and reliable internet is an essential utility for everyone – particularly in a post-pandemic era where people depend on domestic broadband for both professional and personal use, such as gaming.

While Sky Broadband’s recent campaigns to promote its UK services yielded some success, perceptions of its speed meant it lagged behind its nearest competitors.

The Gigafast product is a domestic service that is 25 times faster than traditional broadband. A key audience for this product is gamers of bill-paying age who demand fast and reliable connections.

Traditional campaigns so far had not achieved the results needed by the client, so our challenge was to find a better way to reach a highly sceptical audience, engage them, and drive awareness of Sky’s game-changing product.

We needed to create an association with speed to promote this new service – so we created the ‘Sky Broadband Gigafast Speedrun’ within Fortnite as a takeover of its popular ‘200 Level Default Deathrun’ game. The challenge for players was to complete the course as fast as possible. In return, the player who achieved the speediest time would receive £5,000 of vouchers for the retailer GAME, plus the chance to challenge Ali-A, the UK’s No. 1 Fortnite YouTuber (18.5m subscribers), to a race-off in the final.

To give players more impetus to take part, we created new, enhanced features to push them to achieve faster times than ever before. This truly boosted the Speedrun experience and pushed both creative and physical elements to ensure the Gigafast brand was represented faithfully.

Unsurprisingly, speed is a core driver of business to broadband providers. For games in particular, fast, dependable connections are vital for successful, satisfying play – where results and prestige matter greatly.

While a strategy to communicate directly with our game-playing audience might seem straightforward, the real issue was how to do it in a meaningful way that caught people’s attention and got them to engage.

Our insight was to understand that this is a highly sceptical audience. To encourage any sort of engagement within a gaming space we needed to not only be seen as part of the game’s community, but also focus on play. Only with this level of authenticity and a convincing, entertaining experience would gamers want to interact with us.

In addition to creating the Speedrun in Gigafast branding, we added ‘speed pads’ and ‘Gigafast zones’ to give huge boosts and allow players to complete levels faster than ever before. These were combined with parkour-style elements that tested agility. Everyone who competed was rewarded with a custom Gigafast Speedrun trail.

The execution was all completed through Fortnite itself, using the game’s internal building blocks to create the branding and speed zones – something which had not been done before by anyone else.

Ali-A amplified the Speedrun across YouTube, TikTok and Twitter using the hashtag ‘#Gigafast’. Being able to work seamlessly within the gaming community, from building the Speedrun to Ali-A’s authentic and trusted promotion, allowed us to focus on the one element of the Gigafast product that our client wanted us to highlight: speed.

The key metrics for effectiveness were based on engagement/total plays and dwell time.

Although the campaign was live for just 10 days, it achieved total play time equating to over 46 days, with 1.8m views and 50,000 likes.

Across more than 600,000 hours of engagement, average dwell time was a staggering 26 minutes.

In addition, Ali-A’s livestream of our activation attract 215,000 views – 20 times his normal rate. This was also echoed across his other channels, with our branded content on YouTube seeing an increase of 145%, while TikTok increased by 128%.

It did not stop there either: sales of the Gigafast product increased by 26% in the first two weeks of the campaign, with brand consideration improving by +9pp among prospective customers.