COVID-19 had a punishing effect on small and medium businesses in the UK. It’s estimated that it will cost UK SMBs £126.6 billion. 61% of small business owners reported that they have had serious financial concerns at some point during the pandemic; over 2 million have been unable to access government financial support. For eBay, an online marketplace powered by over 340,000 small businesses in the UK alone, their business relied on these small companies pulling through.

We needed to help revive business for small companies to protect eBay’s own results.

At a time when even the biggest advertisers in the UK were pulling ad spend, eBay bucked the trend, diverting their ad spend towards championing small businesses up and down the UK. This is the story of how eBay used a powerful mix of media channels and a micro-sponsorship platform to save small businesses up and down the UK.

The strategy was to take football back to its roots. Football clubs all started from local businesses and workers – our campaign would give small businesses the opportunity to reclaim their position as sponsors of local clubs.

The campaign championed local clubs and local businesses across the UK via a partnership with the English Football League (EFL), connecting over 140 SMBs with nearby football clubs. Each small business would get local exposure, on-shirt branding, matchday programmes, stadium advertising and club marketing, and eBay would pay for it all. By reinstating these local businesses back to the centre of their community, eBay would ensure that these companies would survive the pandemic turbulence and continue to trade on their marketplace.

This campaign is about local but delivered at national scale. eBay partnered with the EFL to access 72 official clubs and 72 grassroots clubs in the same locations; over 140 sponsorships, with branding on shirts, in stadiums and across clubs’ social and digital inventory. To maximise accessibility, eBay partnered with tech company Ralloo to create a platform allowing any football club to upload what they needed and SMBs to apply as sponsors.

To increase buzz within communities, we used localised OOH and social and sponsored British broadcaster ITV’s regional sports bulletins, heroing relevant clubs and businesses across ten regions.

Finally, to celebrate the importance of local at national scale, we partnered with EFL broadcaster, Sky Sports, creating TV assets featuring football legend, Adebayo Akinfenwa, talking about his own local club and the business supporting it. We used AdSmart to regionally tailor content with longer-form deeper stories on Sky Sports YouTube.

eBay relies on the commercial success of small and medium businesses. This campaign was an enormous project, which leveraged the power of sponsorship, tech partnerships, geographically contextual OOH, TV, AV and social planning to create a real sense of local pride – for football clubs and the business supporting them.

The campaign was enormous and the first of its kind in the UK. Although still ongoing, we are already seeing exceptional results:

• Small Businesses United drove ad awareness up by 25% within the first few weeks of activation

• The campaign saw positive word-of-mouth increase by an enormous 23%

• Purchase intent more than doubled – it increased by a whopping 269%

• Consideration for eBay increased by a massive 18% - an extraordinary win for small businesses.