Video content is a popular fixture on the National Hockey League’s NHL.com and drives a significant proportion of the site’s ad dollars, according to Perry Cooper, SVP-Digital Media for the League. The NHL devised a unique sponsorship opportunity for BlackBerry around video content during the 2010 playoff season, the BlackBerry All-Access Pregame Show.
From April through June 2010, ad content appeared in the video player on the NHL.com homepage and the site’s dynamic lead space above the fold on the homepage, where editorial content is surrounded by dynamic imagery and video. The campaign sought to highlight the BlackBerry Messenger App and promote brand awareness for BlackBerry phones and, specifically, the BlackBerry Messenger. BlackBerry invited fans to add the username “Stanley10” to their contact lists in a bid to drive engagement with online video content and the hosts of a pregame video-based show. BlackBerry sought to test the messenger platform as a vehicle for engaging with a mass audience—to drive brand awareness and engagement with 18- to 34-year-old hockey fans.
Midway through the campaign, the NHL made adjustments to expose fans to the content earlier in the segments, tweaked the message creative to feature on-ice images rather than still images of the show hosts and edited the segments to make them shorter. “In looking at the data, we noticed we weren’t exposing fans to the content early enough,” said Jordan Morse, manager, web analytics, NHL.com. “We weren’t hitting our fans at the right times for video consumption. So we lengthened the window they could watch the videos and then clickthrough began to increase.”
While BlackBerry’s primary goal was brand awareness, it experienced the side benefit of a boost in the number of video starts. By the time the campaign concluded on June 10, there were more than a million video starts.
The NHL found that seamless integration of sponsorship and content is the most important factor for driving success with this type of program. With the Stanley10 username, BlackBerry was also able to encourage tangible and contextually relevant engagement with its brand.
Brands looking to engage men ages 18 to 34 using online video need to “be relevant, to the point and don’t give them information that they can get elsewhere,” Morse explained. “If you can consume the same information as non-video content, they’ll go find it on other pages.” Using short-form video, even as short as 15-second clips, is also a key to success.
According to data from audience data firm Lotame Solutions, online video could be a good way to reach sports fans in general. While the BlackBerry campaign focused on video content rather than advertising, even ads appeal more than average to web users who consume sports-related content online. Video completion rates for this group were nearly 6 percentage points above the average.
BlackBerry was so pleased with the results of the program, it renewed the sponsorship to extend throughout this year’s playoffs, which end on June 18, 2011. The brand started a daily show sponsorship in October which extends through the playoffs, which begin April 13, 2011. As of March 4, the show had several million video starts, according to Omniture data provided by the NHL.