The key insight was formed around ‘The power of support’; how everyone has a role in the ultimate success of a sporting nation. If we could show how the public’s actions were helping the team, it would motivate and inspire further action and amplify reach of the campaign to achieve the ambition to galvanise support from the English nation, and thereby start a ‘movement’. All acts of support would be counted on a live totaliser housed on O2’s rugby website.

Insights confirmed that a key visual the nation associate with the England team is the English red rose on the team shirts.

The campaign ‘Wear The Rose’ involved owned media across the O2 estate, paid media across an array of broadcast and digital channels, experiential activations and the formation of ‘The Rose Army’ who were to become a key group of brand advocates and drive further earned media.

The campaign was designed with social media at the heart and the hashtag ran across all comms to drive the movement through earned media. We initially seeded the campaign across owned social platforms and selected influencers.

Integrated media partnerships with ESI and The Sun helped bring the campaign to life through reactive editorial. The partnerships utilised all touchpoints including their owned assets including newspaper vendors, distribution vans, celeb talent access and distribution channels for merchandise, extending the reach of retail activations.

Ad copy was reactive to the tournament across online and offline channels using dynamic Liveposter and TVTY technology to ensure maximum relevance.

Innovation ran through every channel and included serving personalised and sequential (media first) VOD, OoH product placement on Coronation Street, ITV RWC app ad sync, daily front page presence on the Evening Standard (media first), Snapchat Discover ads and a live social feed into all DOoH sites.

This was to be O2’s most successful social campaign ever, with over 250K mentions of the campaign in social media, by far outweighing the other RWC brands including official sponsors! When compared to the other brand’s RWC campaigns, O2 took a huge 67% SOV in social media over the period with Dove Men coming out second at 15%.

The uptake of #weartherose on game days was higher than that of England Rugby’s #carrythemhome, and it became the common hashtag associated with supporting the team, amongst rugby fans.

We smashed the target of 5m public acts of support, which was counted on a dynamic totaliser on the O2 website and pulled through dynamically into digital and OoH media.

Crucially, brand attractiveness rose by 13.6%, the highest it had been over the course of the year and meant O2 jumped ahead of key competitors in the Telco market.