Company: COPA90
Role: Head of Audience Development
Brief / Mission: Create a content series which would drive over 30,000 subscribers or more
Duration: 6 months
COPA90 was beginning to turn the corner, we’d hit a million views and the subscribers were beginning to grow with us sitting around 30,000 subscribers. We had eradicated some bad content strands but now we were focusing on one huge series to drive the subscriber target set by Google.
The big idea was to send a YouTube creator around Europe to support different champions league games and to challenge one of their fans in each city to a game of football at their fans house. The ideal candidate was KSI, an enormous Fifa YouTuber and fortunately for us we managed to lock him down, he is a busy boy you see. It might sound strange now, but we would rather have KSI on the channel than Eden Hazard because his audience are mobile, digital natives and most importantly subscribers.
It took huge pressure to get this signed off from those in the team who knew that working with a huge YouTube creator from the gaming community, in particular Fifa would bring us huge growth on the channel. KSI is today known as one of the most influential people worldwide, but when we were trying to sell it in to management it was seen as a huge risk. After months the green light was shining!
My role as head of audience development was to work with production teams to map out the overall plan, producers focusing on the production schedule and the cities he would visit. I focused on what KSI would have to do contractually for each episode, the content he would create using his social channels, from Instagram to Twitter and YouTube.
The build up to each game mainly focused on his travel to each new city and calling out to his fans through his Twitter account to play him before the game - this drove insane amounts of interactions. The day he came to London for the Bayern vs Arsenal game his tweet drove over 100,000 interactions in an hour, notifications we’re off the wall!
His subscriber count at the time was around 3 million, even with a simple look at converting 1% of his fan base would leave us with 30,000 new subscribers. If this was achieved, Google and Copa90 agreed that would be a success, which for me was simply music to the ears as I believed the return would be closer to 10-20% due to the affinity of creator and brand.
The content strand landed around 8 million views and drove anywhere from 250,000 subscribers, it put us on the map and it was heralded for months by Google as the way branded content should be!