“We, at Firstpost, are always on the prowl for innovative initiatives which enable elegant solutions for our advertisers. This year for the Cricket Champion’s Trophy 2017, we brought Crowdynews on board partnering with OPPO Mobiles. Crowdynews was the perfect ingredient for a Champion’s Trophy promotion, boosting user engagement and time spent on the page,” stated Azim Lalani, Business Head at Firstpost.
The Champions Trophy is to Cricket as the Confederations Cup is to football. Pakistan won the eighth International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Tournament on 18 June, 2017. 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 intense, OPPO Mobiles, an official sponsor of ICC and Team India, promoted their newly launched mobile device in conjunction with the ICC campaign and Firstpost. Using the hashtag #CT17SelfieExpert, cricket fans captured images and selfies enjoying the Champions tournament.
Social media posts were discovered, filtered, and displayed in a social media stream embedded in the new OPPO phone on Firstpost’s website. Posts included in the horizontal stream (below) were created by fans, team’s official handles, and the ICC; anyone who posted selfies using #CT17SelfieExpert.
The vertical social media stream (right) 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 reposting the selfie to their own feed.
According to Hemanth Kumar, National Sales Head at Firstpost, “the technology is a class apart with a great backend. The Crowdynews team helped us make this campaign a success. The technology gave us an edge over other solutions. With all the social conversations captured in one place the user cannot help but spend time in the social media stream.”
Social Media Branding Results
Both Firstpost and OPPO Mobiles were pleased with the results of the campaign. Specifically, significant interaction with the OPPO sponsored social media stream was realized on Firstpost. 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.