Author: Joe Abi Mansour

Editor: Mehr Hussain

When most football teams were trying to win by hiring strikers for millions of dollars, one team manager, Brian Clough went against the conventional wisdom of the time and was the first to spend a million dollars on a goal keeper. Everyone questioned his sanity. But he ended up winning two consecutive European Cups.

It seems to me that there was a moment around Q2 of this year where most brands switched from ignoring global sport events to strategising about their marketing approach and the role they can play in such mega-moments. And in a seemingly orchestrated move, we're seeing brands and agencies turn to the one solution that will help them win the season: content.

At TikTok, we (and most of our partners) knew clearly that we're a leading force in that space, and so we went to the drawing board, with a multi-disciplinary team to work on cracking how best to be positioned but also how to design our products to act as an effective enabler for brands to drive disproportionate results during that time.

The result can be best summed-up in our now famous proposition for the season “TikTok is the stadium where all brands come to play, and win” which was translated into commercial packages as well as creative best-practices that brands of all sizes and from all industries are now leveraging.

What's more interesting than the result, is how we got to it: For an entertainment player like TikTok, it is very easy to secure a win by focusing on content. After all, content superiority has been our claim to fame over the past few years.

Thinking in terms of content has known inputs that we're quite comfortable with.

But instead of taking the easy route, we wanted to take the right route. So we took a step back and looked at the context within which brands are deploying their content.

As brands turn to content as the be-all-end-all of sport events, we went after the context: During such events, it seems that people act differently, consumers buy differently and they react to brands differently than they do during normal times. So we wanted to dive deeper into the psychological phenomena and behavioral biases that make this context so unique.

While for brands, it seems natural to capitalize on the hype of such events, the challenge lies in doing it in a meaningful way that actually drives business results. In global events where emotions are running rampant, it becomes increasingly important for brands to craft campaigns that instigate an outsized emotional response, placing the brand right there in the stadium with the players, the fans and the teams.

But in order to establish this emotional rapport, brands need to understand fandom at a deep level. What makes people tick during such events? Why are they even watching it, when it seems that most of them aren't interested in the sport in the first place? What are the behavioral and evolutionary bases for them to act so coherently and in tandem?

As everyone is rushing toward content, we ought to learn from Clough and invest where it matters most: the context. Below are a few findings that guided our own strategy, and what they mean for your brands.

As brands turn to content as the be-all-end-all of sport events, we went after the context: During such events, it seems that people act differently, consumers buy differently and they react to brands differently than they do during normal times. So we wanted to dive deeper into the psychological phenomena and behavioral biases that make this context so unique.

While for brands, it seems natural to capitalize on the hype of such events, the challenge lies in doing it in a meaningful way that actually drives business results.  In global events where emotions are running rampant, it becomes increasingly important for brands to craft campaigns that instigate an outsized emotional response, placing them right there in the stadium with the players, the fans and the teams.

But in order to establish this emotional rapport, brands need to understand fandom at a deep level. What makes people tick during such events? Why are they even watching it, when it seems that most of them aren't interested in the sport in the first place? What are the behavioral and evolutionary bases for them to act so coherently and in tandem?

As everyone is rushing toward content, we ought to learn from Clough and invest where it matters most: the context. Below are a few findings that guided our own strategy, and what they mean for your brands.

Group dynamics have always been an evolutionary necessity. They govern our survivorship and self-preservation: Simply put, being part of an in-group increases our chances of survival and passing on our genetic code, but also allows us as a group, to better compete for resources against an outgroup. Group dynamics have been thoroughly studied and documented by scientists like Sigmund Freud and William Schutz. Today we see them everywhere from our online life to our tangible offline relationships. And our membership in different social groups constitutes a major building block of our complex identities. We are citizens of a country, members of a family, fans of a team, employees of a company, and the list goes on.

At first glance, it seems that during sport events, in-groups may be formed by fans of opposing teams. But in reality, fans of different teams come together to watch, discuss and review games and they feed off each other through cheering and bantering (or as they say online 'trolling').  The divide lies elsewhere: it's between the in-group who's engaging with the event and has something to say, vs the out-group which is more passively engaged during this period.

While many struggle to fit in, it seems that once they do, they turn to in-group favouritism and out-group exclusion.

For brands, this means they can't ignore the event or worse, try to integrate it into their communication at a shallow level: They will quickly find themselves falling out of favor based on these unseen and un-acknowledged group dynamics that Schuts calls “The interpersonal underworld”.

Brands need to be there, but most importantly they need to establish themself as “insiders”. This means having a meanigful role to play, while truly listening to the social conversation and contributing to it. Micro-conversations that emerge throughout the event are key: the emotional, the funny, the ecstatic, the sad, and the history-defining moments. But also the trends, the challenges, the screams and the cheers. These moments that only true insiders engage in, are short-lived and evasive by nature but massive in scale and impact. Agility and speed of developing content becomes crucial, but more important still is the ability for brands to maintain their purpose and brand personality throughout these conversations.

In practice, this means brands need to establish themselves as insiders during the period leading up the event: Campaigns that start at least 2-3 weeks early, witness 1.4x lift in ad recall before the magic moment itself. Campaigns that ran for at least 3 weeks during the event saw 2.1x lift in ad recall.

Since our hunting-gathering days, our brains evolved to prioritize attention to bigger animals and larger trees as they present bigger threats or greater opportunities. Our attention is naturally drawn to the biggest and the loudest.

The very nature of mega-events primes people to look for superlatives: The entire discourse becomes about the best team, the quickest goalkeeper, the fastest player, the largest stadium, the loudest fanbase, etc…

It turns out, in a context where superlatives reign supreme, brands need to make much more noise to be noticed. They need to be activated proportionately to the size of the event, or risk being shadowed by the colossal amount of noise generated by other brands and by the event itself.

For brands that want to generate outsized results, this means combining different ad products during big magic moments. In fact, brands that used multi-ad products during sports mega-events, saw 2.4x ad recall when compared to campaigns that used a single ad product.

At a time where seemingly everyone is watching and talking about the same mega sporting events, many don't have much to say about it and find themselves under the threat of being eclipsed in the social conversation.

Winning brands are the ones that activate a chameleon mechanism and carve out their own contextual role during the event. This is best done by finding the intersection between the brand's purpose, and the event's context, allowing marketers to articulate a unique voice that gives impetus to the brand's presence beyond highlighting the event itself.

As brands zero-in on their contextual role during the mega-moment, it becomes easy to identify the right creators to leverage in bringing the brand's role to life. In fact, creator-led campaigns witnessed a 2.1x lift in ad recall during Euro2020.

At the end of the day, a one dimensional view of events might lead you to believe that not all brands are born equal for this opportunity. But as soon as you realize that this is more than a sporting event, but rather a festival of culture and people, then every brand can contribute to the overall experience of joy, if they embrace their relevant context.