The 2018 FIFA World Cup provided an incredible opportunity to revive the greatest English football anthem of all time. Our aim was both to own the World Cup soundtrack with ‘Three Lions’ but also to boost streaming of Sony Music’s extensive football-related repertoire.
We created the ultimate World Cup playlist, Football Songs, placing ‘Three Lions’ at its heart. As a result of our meticulous curation and extensive campaign, Apple Music selected Football Songs as the go-to destination for match day listening providing excellent coverage throughout the duration of the World Cup.
As football hysteria took hold we worked with Spotify to maximise exposure for ‘Three Lions’ securing a total of 69 editorial placements, including Hot Hits UK, #ThrowbackThursday and Viral 50 Global.
Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube all provided extensive social support, highlighting how ‘Three Lions’ was key to the England fan World Cup experience.
To maximise our impact off-platform, we teamed up with Giphy to create the official ‘Three Lions’ channel featuring bespoke GIFs and customised stickers for use on Instagram Stories and Snapchat. The channel has achieved a total of 89m views to date, as well as appearing on the Giphy trending page on Instagram Stories.
To engage a younger streaming audience,we launched the #GetGameReady challenge, in partnership with Musical.ly, encouraging users to prepare for games to the soundtrack of ‘Three Lions’. This allowed us to dominate the homepage as one of the top challenges during England’s first game. We also engaged some of Musical.ly’s top influencers who, along with users, generated over 4,000 videos during the activation.
To support our ‘Three Lions’ activity a paid-social campaign was launched on Twitter using mobile optimised creative to target users engaged in the World Cup conversation. The activity delivered over 5.1m impressions and over 1m video views.
Using Spotify’s custom-built World Cup audience targeting we successfully ran an advertising campaign promoting both ‘Three Lions’ and the Football Songs playlist driving an additional 1.48m impressions as well as achieving an above-label benchmark CTR.
Finally, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of ‘Three Lions 98’, we upgraded the music video to HD helping deliver a further 3.3m views on YouTube.
Capitalising on a moment of maximum impact helped us achieve our goal of making ‘Three Lions’ central to England’s 2018 World Cup story.
The incredible support we received from platforms, media and artists helped drive fan engagement, streams and ultimately scored us a #1 record on the official singles chart (making chart history in the process). In addition to chart success, the Football Songs playlist generated a total of 1.6m streams during the period,making this a truly World Cup winning campaign.
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