Advanced Television

New ESPN ad and promo push

January 19, 2013

ESPN is launching the next phase of its marketing campaign, We
Speak Your Sport, which aims to elevate ESPN’s credentials of serving fans.

Featuring ESPN football presenters such as Ray Stubbs, Chris Waddle and Kevin Keegan plus rugby presenters Ben Kay and Mark Durden-Smith, the campaign aims to communicate ESPN’s passion for sport and reinforce to its audience that it itself is a sports fan, and that its presenters and people are sports fans with diverse views and passions.

We Speak Your Sport will run over the remainder of the season on ESPN TV networks plus digital media, with each creative centring on – and aiming to further spark debate around – a current hot topic within sports.

To support and prompt such debate, online ESPN is driving discussion and debate amongst sports fans with editorial around each creative that weighs up the various sides of the arguments in each creative and invites readers’ fans to voice their own opinions via social media. All editorial will be housed on ESPN’s multi-sport service ESPN.co.uk –
http://www.espn.co.uk/football/sport/story/186408.html

Beginning on Saturday 19th January, the next phase in the campaign, Best League, will focus on the perennial debate over which domestic football league is the best in the world.

Further ads will launch over the rest of the season, including debates on who is the best fly-half (global and all-time, including views of all our talent (inc football, to show we know ALL sports)).

The creative was produced and conceived in-house by ESPN’s on-air promos team, with work led by Sam Murphy, in conjunction with ESPN’s marketing team, led by Alex Lowe.

Alex Lowe, associate marketing director, ESPN, said: “Sports fans aren’t passive viewers and at ESPN we are just as passionate about sport. We want to demonstrate our understanding of sports fans, their passion and insight. We want to communicate the message that we are sports fans just like our audience.”

We Speak Your Sport follows ESPN’s launch of its 2012/13 cross-media advertising and promotional campaign, Cup of Dreams, in support of its live televised coverage of the 2012/13 FA Cup. It draws on ESPN’s Cup of Dreams marketing positioning around its coverage the FA Cup, which plays on notions such as non-league teams dreaming of ‘killing a giant’; or of strikers dreaming of scoring in the final.

We Speak Your Sport is the latest ESPN marketing campaign to engage sports fans. Last August, ESPN launched the UK’s first ever fully integrated digital outdoor engagement campaign, using live, real-time discussion from ESPN’s football presenters to engage football fans nationwide.

Categories: Content, Press Releases