LIDL, the leading grocery retailer in Europe wanted to transfer their key message – exciting and successful shopping – from local stores into the digital world. And, as an official FIFA partner in 2014 they set out to place it in the context of football.
In every world cup emotions run high, especially during penalty shootouts. But sadly, there’s little fans can do to influence the moments of decision. The truth is, they are relegated to being spectators. Recognizing fans desire to take action, we created the Lidl Fan Cup: “Play online. Shoot offline.” The Lidl Fan Cup was an enormous European foosball tournament. It was aimed at all football fans and Lidl Facebook Fans alike. Our goal? To transport the emotions of shopping at Lidl by letting fans experience the scoring of a goal for their own country.
In a 6-week tournament, fans from 23 countries engaged online, shooting offline on real foosball tables. To bring our idea to life, we did something never done before: We engineered 50 electromechanical, web-connected foosball tables. In order to control the game, we developed a facebook web-application. No installation and no plugins were necessary, letting fans play against each other for their own countries from any location and any device. Equipped with 300 cameras we tracked each arena and all penalty shootouts from three different angles. Fans could see their shots in replays and constantly improve. And – by the way – we installed 2 live cams for a real time insight to the place where everything happened.
The 50 tables, each with 2 playing fields, were branded with 25 Lidl product lines. After each move the playing fields were randomly switched. The banners were displayed as Arena Brand Names 2 seconds before the game started. The Intro of each replay included 25 different camera flights over the foosball tables. The replay itself showed the branded banners, which were visible for 6 seconds from three different angles. And at the end of the score, once again the arena brand name was displayed. Some countries additionally displayed Facebook-user targeted Intros with special brand cooperations. Finally, up to 700.000 user saw advertising round about 120.000 hours, but this was only seen subliminally and not perceived as actual advertisement, because soccer fans are used to arena brand names as well as branded banners.
In order to promote the Lidl Fan Cup, we documented every step of the development process and created 40 hours moving material and a huge collection of images. Everything was uploaded to a special content platform only available for press and media. Additionally, the journalists could also view PR stories for consumer, business and technology-orientated media. Lidl Italia hosted a massive PR event at the San Siro soccer stadium in Milan. Special Guest was the former Italian world cup winner and AC Milan star Fabio Grosso. During the press conference Lidl presented the world cup 2014 product range and the Lidl Fan Cup together with the testimonial. For this event a table was placed in the stadium and the media played against Fabio Grosso. The foosball tables were placed in a building downtown Frankfurt with a broadband Internet connection, designed as a real soccer stadium, with media banners, a coaching zone, a press wall and VIP catering. 16 other Lidl countries sent local media experts to visit the Arena to experience 50 tables live in action. Bulgaria invited the current women’s world foosball champion, Ekaterina Atanasova, to visit the arena with an entourage of TV and local News media experts. She played against the journalists, but also against strangers in the tournament. And of course she won some games for her country.
