Onefootball

Getting Emotional: Audience Engagement

Powering the journey from app to brand

The Modern Football Experience

With a monthly reach of 25 million football fans, 180 employees, 20,000 news sources and capabilities across 12 languages on both its own platforms (app and website) and a host of social channels, Berlin-based Onefootball is a leading example of the new wave of sports media brand, unencumbered by legacy and designed to reach a next generation of fans.

However, Onefootball is still on the journey from product to brand and, in seeking to define what it stands for, commissioned Crowd DNA to explore the role of emotion in the modern football experience. This work would inform a major branding initiative, spanning look, feel and message. Game on.

Methods & Markets

1. A series of Onefootball stakeholder interviews, to unlock audience and brand perspectives from across the different teams (marketing, product, content, partnerships, sales)

2. We then focused on the priority markets for this work: Brazil, Germany and the UK, collaborating with football fans, varying from the casual to hardcore

3. We set citizen journalism briefs for them to respond to by mobile; also having access to their Instagram accounts to gather colourful stimulus material on how they like to portray themselves

4. We selected the most relevant participants from the mobile phase, conducting in-person friendship groups to learn more about the social and cultural value of football fandom. We watched games; we checked out memorabilia; we uncovered match-day rituals and the role of sports media across the week

Back To Berlin

This gave us high grade fuel to take back to Berlin, informing a workshop day that brought together:

+ Gen Z trends

+ Six themes of fandom

+ More granular insights around perceptions of Onefootball and competitor media

Identifying the richest territories to move forwards with, Onefootball’s dynamic new purpose and identity is now taking shape.

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.