The Everything But Football Football Show.
Just don’t say the F word.
An award-winning online content series with the biggest names in football talking about, well, everything but football. It’s right there in the title. We grabbed millions of views across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
When I took over the Manchester United sponsorship, there was no content strategy. Each month we were given one hour to film the players, and we would use these appearances for one-off pieces of creative. The work was not performing well and the players hated delivering scripted lines to camera. So we came up with a strategy and this series. After our first season, Manchester United and the Premiere League used our show as a case study and benchmark for other sponsors on how to create compelling content.
Creating the first Twitter-only content series.
We collaborated with Twitter to create the first Twitter-only content series with custom-built functionality of retweeting to subscribe, interactive polls, in-content comments and more.
Getting scrappy.
With a $750 million sponsorship, it’s crucial to take advantage of every content opportunity. The problem was we had less than an hour with the players to film each episode. A daunting task with professional actors, let alone professional athletes. So we had to get nimble and act as our own b-crew, filming our own additional bits while the episode was being shot. Some were scripted, some candid, but they would have all been missed without us there to film them. Then we would edit them together, throw in some movie magic, and make short, snackable pieces of content to use as promos, pre-roll and bonus content. We called them Football Shorts and they ended up being more fun to make than the show itself. Plus the client loved our scrappy approach to taking full advantage of this high-priced sponsorship.
