The Champions Trophy is to Cricket as the Confederations Cup is to football. Pakistan won the eighth International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Tournament on Sunday, 18 June. Competing for the trophy were the eight top-ranked One Day International (ODI) teams in the world including England, Australia, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Similar to the Confederations Cup, England (like Russia) automatically qualified for the tournament as the host country.
Pakistan won the trophy for the first time with a 180-run victory over India in the final match. The margin of victory was the largest by any team in the final of an ICC tournament in terms of runs. Other firsts included the West Indies failed to qualify for the first time and Bangladesh returned to the tournament for the first time since 2006.
SOCIAL MEDIA BRANDING OPPORTUNITY
Knowing that coverage of the tournament would be widespread, Firstpost partnered with OPPO Electronics (an electronics manufacturer in China) to promote a newly released mobile phone. Using the hashtag #CT17SelfieExpert, cricket fans and team members captured and shared images of themselves participating in the Champions tournament.
Social media posts were captured, filtered, and displayed in a social media stream on Firstpost’s website. The posts were displayed within an image of the new OPPO smartphone. Posts included in the horizontal stream were created by fans, team’s official handles, and the ICC; anyone who posted selfies using #CT17SelfieExpert.
The vertical social media stream captured live updates from the stadiums where the matches were played based on geo-tracking.
Readers could scroll through the social media posts within the stream, clicking to enlarge and engage with a post such as liking, sharing, or re-posting the selfie to their own feed.
SOCIAL MEDIA BRANDING RESULTS
Both Firstpost and OPPO Electronics were pleased with the results of the campaign. Specifically, Firstpost realized significant interaction with the OPPO sponsored social media stream. Almost 10% of readers who viewed the social media stream on the Firstpost website clicked on a post to view it in a larger format. And, those people who clicked to view the enlarged post scrolled through the stream viewing, on average, an additional one and a half social media posts making this select group of readers highly engaged.
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