CHALLENGES & GOALS:

Fountain Tire, an auto service and tire retailer headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, sponsored their hometown NHL hockey team, the Edmonton Oilers.

Tires, the organization’s main source of sales, is a grudge purchase that consumers don’t want to spend money on. So, Fountain Tire’s sponsorship with the Edmonton Oilers was an opportunity for the brand to drive deeper engagement through a shared passion – instead of a pain point.

The challenge was that Fountain Tire was competing for the attention of fans against larger sponsors, who outspend them 60:1, making it difficult to stand out. As a result, sponsorship awareness was low. So, Fountain Tire’s goal was to drive fan engagement by overcoming the brand’s limited budget and a crowded environment.

INSIGHTS & STRATEGY:

A deep dive into social conversation and sentiment surrounding the Edmonton Oilers uncovered an interesting finding - Oilers fans have a level of devotion to their team that rivals any winning franchise, despite so many failed seasons. Fountain Tire, as the hometown sponsor, understood this passion better than any national sponsor.

This meant Fountain Tire was uniquely positioned to engage a passionate fan base about a locally relevant topic, without having to outspend the competition. Fountain Tire could use their greatest asset – a shared, rabid passion for the local team – to engage diehard fans in a way big sponsors wouldn’t. Focusing on the channels where Oilers passion was already being unleashed, social media.

THE EXECUTION:

Any sponsor can “join the online conversation” by simply cheering on a team. But as the hometown brand, Fountain Tire was more devoted to the Oilers than anyone else. So, they did something no other large, national sponsor would do. They literally donated their bodies to Oilers fans.

Introducing Fountain Tire Fanbods - the first ever human typeface made for fans, by fans. Just like diehard fans in full body paint, real Fountain Tire employees – ranging from senior leadership to tire techs – were painted as crazed Oilers fans and turned into every letter of the alphabet, including numbers and emojis.

Using a simple mobile interface, fans could actually type in cheers using the Fanbods font and then send those cheers to the Oilers via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Rather than just creating an ‘ad’, we created a human font – something diehard fans could co-create. Turning a functional media, a typeface, into a uniquely ownable vehicle to connect with fans.

TECHNOLOGY & TOOLS:

To bring the idea to life, real Fountain Tire employees had their bodies hand-painted like avid sports fans and then were filmed and photographed to create a unified typeface. To generate deepened engagement, each letter, number and emoji were created as a video file. A Symfony Web framework was used to render the animated typeface in real-time, so that when a user types a message, characters would appear with movement as the word is written. For a fast and seamless mobile experience, a static photo of the cheer was rendered for social sharing.

Built-in logic was included to reduce letter duplication in some words with multiple vowels. That way, when a user types a word containing the same letter, they’d be served various versions of the letter to avoid redundancy.

The solution also integrated with a profanity validation service to prevent offensive content. Over 5000 words in six languages were inputted into the system. When a user tried to use a blocked word, the system displayed an “unsportsmanlike conduct” message and asked users to try again.

USER EXPERIENCE:

To build the most intuitive user experience, Fountaintirefanbods.com was created as a mobile first microsite, knowing that’s where fans would be sharing their cheers.

When a user visited the site for the first time, a short video played to familiarize them with all of the functions and features. Users could then create their cheers using a custom keyboard that was designed with people’s texting behaviour in mind, mirroring user’s native browser on mobile devices.

To create a seamless experience, fans were given the option of selecting pre-populated cheers, which were loaded into the keyboard, or to build their own. The site also contained an aggregator of all fanbod cheers, where fans could draw inspiration and join the fandom.

SUPPORTING CHANNELS:

The campaign kicked-off with a social video to drive awareness, followed by real-time posts to encourage cheering at peak Oilers moments. To help sustain momentum, a small number of occasions on sports talk radio, game broadcasts, and pre-roll during live streaming were included.

The Fanbods were also featured during an in-game activation at the home opener. Real Fanbods took to the stands and spelled out the cheers generated online – allowing fans to share their message directly to the team. The Fanbods were captured on the arena’s jumbotrons, providing additional earned exposure.

All this was achieved with only $60,000 in media, over 6-weeks, around the Edmonton market.

THE RESULTS & IMPACT:

The campaign successfully engaged Oilers fans despite significantly fewer resources than other sponsors:

- What started as a local platform for the Edmonton Oilers quickly spread to become a North American-wide platform for the entire NHL. The interface was used by fans from 24 out of the 31 NHL hockey teams, in 7 out of 10 Canadian provinces, and 13 states in the USA.

- The microsite was visited by fans from 65 different countries and generated 2,084,760 impressions in just 6 weeks.

- Visitors to fountaintirefanbods.com spent on average over 2 minutes on the interface, indicating they were engaged with the brand.