Show Your Five

Five-a-side football was growing in popularity in the UK. Anyone who has ever managed a regular 11-player team will know how hard it is to get eleven players to turn up. As a result, Nike launched a bespoke set of products adapted for this type of football. Many young players found organised five-a-side too expensive and therefore inaccessible. To help them improve their game, Nike created Show Your Five - a national five-a-side tournament designed to appeal to an urban youth audience who typically wouldn’t enter tournaments of this size.

The challenge was to get people involved and maintain momentum until the final. With 2,100 team places to fill in just three weeks, this was no mean feat.

Nike knew that there was a fervent desire for self-expression and fame among this audience. They liked - among other things - music, going out, internet, gaming and girls. When they played their disorganised games of five-a-side would earn local fame and bragging rights, but a brand like Nike could help catapult them on to the national stage.

For the recruitment phase, Nike partnered with YouTube and launched a TV commercial and YouTube homepage takeover simultaneously during the half-time break of a key Champions League game. Tactical online display throughout Google drove traffic to the recruitment hub. Using regional taunts, Nike also deployed tactical OOH, radio and mobile executions to provoke and inspire the best local team to represent their region, including a partnership with Xfm where DJs recruited their own teams.

To maintain momentum, local and regional tournament highlights were filmed and published on Nike Football’s YouTube channel, which gave bragging rights to the better players who were featured. A tool allowed people to edit the video and publish tournament footage and their own videos through an exclusive masher tool.

YouTube promoted the final through Guest Editor slots, home-page banners, and display advertising throughout Google in the week prior. The final was broadcast on YouTube on Sunday 10th May, the first-time that an “appointment to view” has been created on YouTube. Extra content was also created by a YouTube Super User, called Smivadee.

As a result, the tournament sold out in 10 days, with 2,160 teams taking up the challenge. YouTube placements drove a 500% increase in traffic in the first week of recruitment. Some 6,500 additional young players signed up to the brand channel (a 100% increase) and more than 20,000 videos were created within the Masher, with more than 400 videos published by users. In total, there were 1.1m views of Nike 5 content over 3 months. The campaign culminated with 30,000 visits to the brand channel on final day, with Final content driving 240,000 views itself. Smivadee created his most popular video ever, with over 95,000 views.