Euro 2016 Sponsor Campaigns: A Hard Fought Game For Brands In A League Of Their Own

National pride. It’s at an absolute peak as we head into the knockout stages of Euro 2016 in France. In our last sports post, we looked at some of the ways brands are reaching the back of the net with engaging coverage of this exciting sporting event.

There are social media campaigns from official partners everywhere this summer. The vast majority of these are aimed at the quintessential engaged football fan, but how many have truly hit the target so far?

This week, we’ll consider some of the brands with the budgetary firepower to become an official tournament sponsor, and the scale of the opportunity they have.

#Euro2016 recorded 12 billion impressions on Twitter this week

As far as high profile sporting events go, you may remember one of our recent studies about ads that rocked the Super Bowl on Twitter (#SB50), where single strands of campaign content were notching up millions upon millions of impressions at the post level.

What fascinates me about this tournament and others like it, is that the larger brands are forced to play the long game in order to outdo each other. Rather than going all out with eccentric burst campaigns prior, during and following one single climactic fixture, it’s up to content managers to sustain their analytical performance for an entire month.

With demographics of engaged users in no way limited to competing nations, the world is clearly watching! However, delivering a structured programme of show-stopping content is something easier said than done.

The team over at Leo Burnett recently posted this awesome ranking entitled the “Brandtasy League” of each sponsor’s saliency during the competition. A universal points system carefully pieces together all-important competencies such as awareness, perceived fit, affinity, purchase intent, overall sponsorship and social engagement.

I was ever so slightly inspired, so I set about tracking two of these campaigns via Locowise before the weekend so we could look at them head to head.

Campaign: Socar’s #MakeYourDebut

Campaign: Mars #Believe

Key takeaways