Diageo and FANZO - Bringing Sports Sponsorship To Life

Since 2019, Diageo has worked with FANZO to activate a range of sports campaigns in pubs. The results have been astounding. More than 200,000 incremental visits to over 7,000 pubs, delivering sales uplift of 14% above control. We spoke with David Callaghan, Head of On Trade Activation, to tell the story from Diageo’s point of view.

In this series, we’ll take you on David’s journey - from identifying a problem, trialling a concept and rolling it out, navigating Covid, and bouncing back to even greater heights.

In this first article, we look at the challenges David and his team faced in 2018 as they sought to bring a new sports sponsorship to life and spark growth back into Guinness.

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Guinness. It’s everywhere. 1 in 10 pints served in the UK. 1 in 3 in Ireland.

Awards for marketing activity are so regular you could be forgiven thinking the brand’s owner Diageo hosted the awards themselves. You can’t visit a pub these days without seeing hands holding sturdy pints of the black stuff - a triumph of superb positioning and first-class activation.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in 2018, David and his activation team had a problem. Actually, they had a few of them.

Advertising Restrictions

Advertising legislation was becoming more restrictive. There had always been different legislation around TV advertising in Ireland, but it seemed that restrictions would eventually extend to sponsorship activation too.

Having just signed a six year deal to sponsor the Six Nations, and with a mandate to attract a new younger audience, this wasn’t ideal news.

An Overdue Digital (R)evolution

By 2018, there was an increasingly vocal case being made for the moral responsibility to transition from physical to digital:

"When I think about what our customers ask for, a lot of them are looking into their responsibilities - our collective responsibilities - and thinking about sustainability. They don't necessarily want their pubs cluttered with older, more conventional advertising. They see their consumers sitting in pubs on their phones and using digital."

You cannot endlessly print point-of-sale material.

The direction of travel (from physical to digital activation) had been evident for years. Guinness had tried to run their own app (Guinness+) in the early 2010s but couldn’t get the desired stickiness and faced consistent ‘gaming’ of free pint mechanics.

"We had a different level of digital penetration and participation compared with other markets. The Irish market has a lot of independently owned pubs. Many of them are very advanced in their use of digital programmes, but there weren't 1000 accounts at a time stepping into new digital capability."

Delivering consistent digital activation at scale was easier said than done.

Efficiency Through Flexibility

Every big business faces calls for more efficient spending. Some are obligated to cut 15% costs every year simply to “trim the fat”.

Big FMCG companies printing POS achieve efficiency by planning months in advance and obtaining remarkably sharp commercials with manufacturers, often transporting materials across the world.

Effective, perhaps. Flexible, certainly not.

"As circumstances have changed in the world, the degree of flexibility and agility that a digital programme can offer (“Switch it on quickly, switch it off quickly”) allows us to be very adaptable whenever we need to do that. You don't need to halt an enormous tanker bringing your point of sale over from China if you need to turn something off or, indeed, order one."

All this left David scratching his head. Having tried and failed with their own platforms and with no obvious partner operating in Ireland, the options seemed thin on the ground.

An Olive Brand From Across The Sea

Diageo was operating as a single organisation across GB and Ireland so there were regular opportunities to compare notes on what was working where. James Metcalfe, his equivalent in GB at the time, had faced similar issues and found a partner to help overcome them.

James had first partnered with MatchPint during the 2015 Rugby World Cup when, as Diageo’s National Account Manager for Stonegate Pubs, he’d introduced the platform and funded campaigns to activate Guinness in hundreds of sports pubs.

Now in his role as Head of On-Trade Activation, James developed a plan to roll FANZO’s Guinness Pint Predictor programme out in line with Guinness’ broader rugby activity:

"One of my colleagues explained that he'd been partnering with FANZO (then MatchPint) for a year or two. We had a look and there was plenty to like. He explained that you developed a partnership and a great collaboration in GB and that they'd made it an integral part of the rugby programme at the time. To hear that you were very connected with the Guinness brand plans… Well, there was a lot to be interested in."

Problem solved…

Not So Fast

But the Irish market is different to GB. While the latter has big companies controlling thousands of pubs, nearly every one of Ireland’s 7,000 pubs is independently owned and operated. Digital adoption amongst consumers couldn’t be taken for granted either.

With fingers burned in the past, FANZO would have to prove its value before going further.

Next week… how Diageo ran a localised proof of concept in Belfast to test the viability.