Sky shows BT how to do footie ads

Thierry Henry fronts Sky’s latest ad by indie agency Brothers and Sisters

As Sky gets the nation talking about its latest campaign, challenger BT could not have got it more wrong with its execrable ads starring Ewan McGregor, writes Dominic Mills.

BT, Sky has to hang on to its crown jewels – and so far it’s winning

I usually don’t like football ads. They mostly follow the same, dreary, formula: fly a motley collection of international superstars to a studio for a day, show them joshing with each other in a forced way (they probably secretly hate their peers anyway) and have them perform amazing feats of trickery (no doubt CGI-assisted).

Buy these boots and be like them. Yeah, really.

Now it’s late July and, with the Premier League season less than a month away, I’m steeling myself for the onslaught.

But what’s this? A footie ad – from Sky of all people – that’s got wit and charm, and the excitement, drama and passion that football is all about.

Launched last week, the ad celebrates some of the greatest moments in the last 23 years of Sky’s Premier League coverage. It stars the legend, and newly signed up Sky pundit, Thierry Henry. It’s by indie agency Brothers and Sisters.

Henry is seen as a bystander – a cross between a Greek chorus and the eponymous Woody Allen character Zelig – at some of these moments: running on the pitch as Manchester United celebrate their first Fergie title; wiping the camera clean after Stevie Gerrard kisses it; and in crowd with Manchester City fans as Sergio Ageuro scores that goal.

And, of course, there are some scenes where he himself is the star, notably the goal against Tottenham that clinched Arsenal’s last title win.

Naturally, all this stuff is going down well with the media and the public. Even Sky’s sworn enemies – like the Mail Online – are raving about it. And the Mirror is asking whether this is the greatest ad ever (answer: no, but it ain’t bad at all).

But the point is that it’s doing what it needs to do, which is to get talked about.

Contrast this with the current, and very lame offering, from BT Sports.

This execrable film stars Ewan McGregor (er, why?) in which the faux-humorous conceit is that we are taken behind the scenes of the shoot for the latest BT TV ad.

[advert position=”left”]

Yes, it’s an ad about making an ad. And the truth is that, when the ad is about making the ad, you know they’ve got nothing decent to say.

If the other point of the Sky ad is to show pedigree, legacy and ‘football authenticity’, then Sky wins hands down. BT, you think, is the upstart without class or style.

The parallel, it seems to me, is that the first game of the season when newly promoted Watford take on Chelsea and come down to earth with a thud. Yes, you realise, the gap between the old hands and newbies is huge.

Of course it is not quite like that. If BT is the just-climbed-out-of-the-Championship upstart, it at least has a huge stash of money to burn, money that it has spent most recently on wresting away the UEFA Champions League from Sky.

That, at the very least, makes BT a more than serious challenger, the equivalent of a promoted club backed by some moneybags foreign tycoon for whom splashing a hundred million here or there is small change.

But, to use footie parlance, this is a defining season for both broadcasters. In the face of an increasingly aggressive BT, Sky has to hang on to its crown jewels.

For all the credibility of its other programming (Sky Atlantic, Sky News, Sky Arts), it is football that defines Sky and is its shop window.

Which is why the ads really matter, and where – as the season gets underway – the battle will be fought.

Both Sky and BT have huge budgets to spend – we can already see the skirmishes in the press ads where each trumpets their early-season games.

For other media owners, it’s lick-your-lips and fill-your-boots time. I can hear the kerching already.

By the way, on my one-man mission to examine the genius (or not) of online targeting, I can report that when watching the ad on the Mirror site, I was greeted by a pre-roll for Imodium.

I know the Sky commentators get so hysterical they are prone to verbal diarrhoea, but this is ridiculous.

Pointless surveys: a new series

As we head into the silly season, I am on full alert for pointless advertising and media surveys, the sort organisations think will earn them some cheap publicity when proper news is in short supply.

There’s a technique to this sort of survey: take an issue that is on the public agenda, do a quick online survey, paying no heed whatsoever to representative sampling, and – to put the cherry on the cake – proclaim that MediaOrganisation X has the solution.

One particularly egregious example last week came from programmatic supplier (who else, eh?) TubeMogul, which claimed that 60pc of the population want the licence fee scrapped in favour of an ad-supported model. All this based on a non-representative sample of 1,400 online video viewers. Scientific or what?*

And guess what? If the BBC went ad supported, the programmatic boys could help. In their words: “[the BBC] would be able to better target ads to key markets (which would entice advertisers) and ensure that viewers aren’t being bombarded with advertising that isn’t relevant to their lifestyle.”

Yeah, like Imodium ads when you’re watching a football commercial.

You can’t make it up, can you?

————

*[Like other trade publications, Newsline is guilty of reporting on this – but we were very clear of the survey’s limitations and agenda – a mildly embarrassed Ed]