We have pushed the boundaries in our use of live stunts and piggy-backing on high profile sporting events - and it's spectacularly paid off!

Paddy Power has always been about power to the punter and, under the umbrella campaign of 'We Hear You', our aim was to make these events even more entertaining and interactive for the spectator - and drive incredible PR as a result from blanket international coverage to owning social.

OBJECTIVE & CHALLENGE

Move Paddy Power from a betting brand to an iconic sports entertainment brand that's part of conversations around major sporting events.

STRATEGY

We're all about power to the punter so we created huge-scale stunts and wittily infiltrated high-profile sporting events that truly dazzled and entertained spectators in order to get the world talking about us.

EXECUTION

1) We identified the most high-profile sporting events in the year that we wanted to have a presence at and use as a springboard for our message: Cheltenham Festival, Euro 2012 and the Ryder Cup

2) We worked tirelessly to plan unexpected and smart 'mischief' (e.g. stunts) around or at these events - all stemming from messages / requests we had from punters on our social media channels

3) We executed against these with stealth and used the 'surprise' factor and sheer ambition of the projects to deliver unprecedented levels of talkability and PR

OUTCOME

Incredible levels of growth coupled with rocketing levels of coverage & engagement (outdoing official sponsors),

Paddy Power's Head of Mischief developed a series of stunt ideas over the year, inspired by punter comments as they got more and more vocal on our social media channels.

There were many challenges - involving everything from overnight transformations on the side of a hill to erecting a 160ft statue in high winds of Roy Hodgson in Rio's Christ the Redeemer pose on a cliff face - but we managed to:.

1) Put a giant jockey on a huge old chalk drawing in the English countryside in response to a punter asking us on Facebook how we would top our 'hollywood' sign from before (Cheltenham Festival)

2) Make a surprise appearance in a Euros game in the form of our branded lucky pants on the Danish striker Bendtner

3) Help Europe to victory by giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine with our record-breaking 'sky-tweets' (Ryder Cup)

Outputs:

- Ryder Cup 'sky tweets' featured on official footage throughout the weekend with a potential TV audience of 500m and delivered 160 global articles

- Bendtner revealed his Paddy Power lucky pants which led Google analysts to estimate global coverage to be worth £10m and the stunt continues to be cited as 'the' example of 'over-reaction' by a sporting body that continues to drive coverage now

- Cheltenham, a more UK-centric stunt, delivered blanket national coverage and high levels of talkability across PP social channels

In short, goal achieved to become an undeniable and mischievous part of the sporting conversation and stories in 2012.

Outcomes:

- Consistently improving brand equity scores across 2012

- Social footprint grown from 70k to over 500k with higher engagement scores than Nike, Sky Sports and the Sun

- Best performing Ryder Cup and Euros for PP to date (see 'Confidential information' for more business results