Brief

The world’s greatest annual sporting event, the Tour de France, was beginning in the world’s greatest county – Yorkshire. Our client, Yorkshire Building Society, was an official supporter of the Tour and wanted to do something on the day of the Grand Départ to squeeze even more from their sponsorship - although nearly all the budget had been spent on more classic activity.

Context

We realised that the Tour, with quite a media circus in tow, would be passing a farmer’s field on 5th July. So if we could do something remarkable in that field then YBS might get valuable free media amplification in realtime and thereafter. So, we put a 30metre banner in a field surrounded by 150 yellow dyed sheep (imitating the famous yellow jersey).

Results

We achieved scale and impact on a tiny budget: pre-tour coverage on ITV and BBC breakfast; on the day Tour coverage overhead and on the ground on ITV and Eurosport; 2,126 twitter mentions with a reach of 5.3 million with re-tweets from top tweeters such as Davina McCall, Chris Froome, Ed Clancy, ITV, BBC and even the Yorkshire Police; Images were used as the official The Tour de France Twitter page.