COPA90

why

COPA90 is a YouTube channel funded by Google and produced by BigBalls Media, the channel had been launched and the content strands not getting much love at all - especially considering the budgets. COPA90 realised they needed to bring in some digital first thinking people to beef up their social / audience development team. Enter me.

what?

I was asked to review the current channel content and feedback to the production teams whilst taking control of all social channels. The digital team was pretty much me in the early days and once I had reviewed the content it was quite clear we had to cut the current content strands. As you can see it was like a cross between disney and hell.

The COPA team had a target of 250,000 subscribers after year one, and they were sitting with less than 10,000 3 months in - to hit the target we were gonna have to start making a different kind of content.

how?

The production teams at BigBalls were second to none, the problem was that they were making it in a way that wasn’t building distribution into the content. No matter how beautiful your videos are, when a decade of content is uploaded to YouTube every day, you need to make it for the platform.

A few of us in the team knew we should be working with content creators from the platform, through collaboration is how the platforms major stars had come to power and we were studying that very deeply. We believed talent + affinity = subscribers, the closer their content was to football, the more return we would garner. Of course we wanted football fans, but people who love the game aren’t just football fans, they like all sorts of things, especially on YouTube.

We decided to collaborate with channels from various backgrounds, be it sport, science or even rap, to reach a varied audience and target outside the normal channels of communication for a sport brand. Early collaborations with STR Skill school and V Sauce led the way, creating with UK rap YouTube channel Don’t Flop, releasing a highly relevant rap battle video featuring two big rap artists from the UK scene.

Without licenses to make content utilising footage from the beautiful game, the direction of the channel was to build it ‘around the game’ and focus on the fans. Lower-budget strands such as Comments Below would become integral and weaving the the other strands through them, subtly at times, but enough to keep cross-pollinating the different fan bases to the various strands on the channel.

We had began to master collaboration techniques and how it should be set-up, me and my partner in crime Anwar Nuseibeh introduced content plans for the overall channel and individual ones for all talent within our collaboration content. These were used masterfully in what is still possibly the biggest campaign i’ve ever been a part of.

We based the new series on one of our existing content strands, The Eurofan which I particularly liked, apart from Tom Deacon as the shows host (no offense Tom, you just had no audience to bring to the party). The idea was to send YouTube gaming sensation KSI around Europe, challenging his fans to games of Fifa and going to a game each Champions League week. It worked an absolute treat, and the contract and obligations we worked into the contract still make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, because it was this that led to the 10 million + views and over 300,000 subscribers during its time, and of course the content was bloody good!

Possibly my final great moment at COPA was with the Fifa Playa content strand, turning him into a character across platforms, again contract obligations and some little sneaky magic led to what was and still is the biggest content strand they have decided to do - all with a character that didn’t even exist. The Fifa Playa Twitter account at one point was bigger than COPA90s official page, it still has over 70,000 followers and hasn't tweeted in years. The Playa’s YT channel, which became Spencer FC sits over 1 million subs today!

So what and who gave a shit?

The people at Google who funded it! :D But seriously they were, it was the only Google Originals funded channel which was refunded (50 worldwide). The channel now sits with over 100 million views and over a million subscribers, they have since acquired their only main competitor, Kick TV and are focused on becoming a sports media type agency thing - none of this would have been possible if me and a few guys didn’t kick up a fuss about the way the TV heads at BigBalls thought content was made in the 21st Century.

Next: New Media Strategist