#159 2020 · Burger King / David Miami · Fast food / sports sponsorshipbuy-the-mispriced
Burger King couldn't afford to sponsor a top football club's shirt, so it sponsored the one club whose shirt sponsor logo the video game actually renders correctly
the problem
Sponsoring the biggest, most visible team costs vastly more than a challenger brand can justify, but sponsoring a small one gets almost no visibility
background
Shirt sponsorship on a top-tier football club is one of the most expensive brand placements in sports, with deals running into the tens of millions of pounds a season (Chevrolet's Manchester United deal was reported around £64 million), pricing out any challenger brand that isn't already a global giant. Burger King's marketing team, working with agency David Miami, noticed something about how those expensive top-club shirts actually appear inside FIFA, the world's best-selling football video game: real-world shirt sponsor logos on many top clubs are frequently altered, replaced or genericized in the game due to licensing conflicts, while a small, lower-league club's shirt — with a sponsor deal too minor to trigger the same conflicts — renders exactly as it appears in real life.
That meant a brand sponsoring a small club's actual shirt, at a small club's actual price, could end up with more accurate and durable visibility inside the video game millions of people played than a brand paying enormous sums for a top club's shirt, whose sponsor logo the game might not even display correctly.
the move
Burger King sponsored Stevenage FC, then in England's fourth-tier League Two, at a fee reportedly around £50,000 (never officially confirmed by either party) — a tiny fraction of top-flight shirt-sponsorship costs — and ran 'The Stevenage Challenge,' inviting FIFA players worldwide to select the obscure club in career mode, build a team around global superstars, and share their results online for a chance at free Burger King, turning an unremarkable fourth-division club into a globally recognized name inside the game.
the payoff
Players posted more than 25,000 goals scored with Stevenage online, the club briefly became one of the most-used teams in FIFA's career mode, and Stevenage's own jerseys sold out for the first time in the club's history as real-world interest followed the in-game phenomenon — all from a sponsorship costing a small fraction of what a single top-tier club shirt deal would have required.
what came after
The Stevenage Challenge won the Direct Grand Prix and a Gold Lion at Cannes Lions 2020, and is cited across marketing and sports-sponsorship literature as a reference case for finding disproportionate digital visibility in an overlooked, cheaply priced placement rather than competing directly for an expensive, contested one.
references
- [1]Burger King's Obscure Football Sponsorship Wins Cannes Direct Grand PrixAdweek, 2020adweek.com
- [2]Burger King reveals the FIFA ploy behind decision to sponsor League Two side StevenageGoal.com, 2020goal.com