Introduction
Mitre has been supplying balls to the 72 Football League clubs for over 25 years. For the 2007/08 season they developed 24 individual balls for the 24 teams competing in the Championship. To help support the hugely important new product launch, Pitch PR devised ‘Pass It On’ - a viral video campaign combining comical swipes at big brand big budget advertisements and classic terrace humour. Unlike viral campaigns from multi-billion pound sports companies with large marketing budgets the success of Pass It On would rely solely on PR with no newspaper, print or television advertising spend to support it.

Objectives
To launch the new club specific balls in a way that would engage fans of the Championship sides and drive sales via the 24 club shops. It was also essential for the campaign to achieve media coverage in key regional titles and demonstrate Mitre’s appreciation of ‘real football’ associated with the Championship. Finally is was essential to raise brand awareness at a key time for the company.

Strategy and Plan
Pitch and Mitre set about securing buy in to the campaign from the Football League and the 24 Championship clubs – requesting a player or manager from each club and a set amount of time to film the individual clips. Despite none of the players or managers being paid for their appearance a number of the leagues most high profile names were secured including Watford’s Marlon King, Sheffield United’s Chris Morgan and managers Ian Holloway of Plymouth Argyle and Brian Laws of Sheffield Wednesday.

Ideas for scenes involved twists on previous videos as well as a series of ideas that would directly appeal to and engage specific fans – for example Stephen Hughes of Coventry City being picked up by a Leicester City fan (their arch rivals) and Iain Hume (a Canadian) of Leicester City playing ice hockey with the ball.

In less than six weeks Pitch had successfully filmed at all 24 clubs – a feat that even surprised the Football League.
David Malkinson, Football League Marketing Manager said: “The ‘Pass It On’ campaign not only provided a superb platform to launch Mitre’s new [Coca-Cola Championship] club specific balls but also helped us promote the start of the new season. The campaign was innovative and the results achieved are testament to the hard work of all involved”.

In order to help secure coverage, contacts from key publications were invited to appear in the video in order to lock them into features at a later date. The best example of this was by giving Matt Smith, presenter of The Championship on ITV, his own scene – ITV subsequently featured it at the end of the first show of the new season.

The decision was taken to host the video on Youtube in order to accurately collate the number of views and all PR activity would require embedding of the video, directing people to the Youtube URL or Mitre’s website where the video was also embedded. Four weeks prior to launch Pitch set up Pass It On pages on social networking sites Facebook and Myspace. The idea was to build up a database of ‘friends’ and communicate directly with the target audience.

Measurement and Evaluation
On the day the video launched it received 18,000 hits. After the first seven days it had passed the 50,000 figure and had peaked at the 11th most watched video on Youtube that week. The video seeding was backed up by more than 50 pieces of national, regional, web and TV coverage– including The Sun, The Guardian, Soccer AM, Sky Sports News, ITV, Virgin Radio, Zoo, Maxim, Match and Monkey, the latter calling Pass It On ‘the best football video ever’. The video was also shown at the grounds of all 24 clubs during the first two games of the 07/08 season.

In total the video link was posted on more than 11,000 websites globally, including thousands of fans pages for clubs in the Championship. Feedback not only commended the video for its real and gritty feel and managing to achieve something that simply wouldn’t be possible with Premier League stars but also a huge amount of fans stating their intensions to purchase their club ball. Above all else the beauty of the campaign was what it managed to achieve on such a small budget.

Results
Coverage for the campaign stretched across national television, radio, newspapers and magazine, key regional titles for each club and the web. Return on investment for coverage alone was more than five times the initial outlay from Mitre.

Over 20 per cent of the views received came directly from the Mitre website and the company received a large number of direct enquires from fans regarding the availability of the balls for purchase.

Orders placed by the 24 clubs for the months after the launch of the video were more than 15,000.