Nothing brings people together (or drives them apart, if we’re being honest), like the most popular sport on earth. The same could be said for smartphones.
As an official sponsor of UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), Taiwanese smartphone and tablet maker HTC created a series of Vines starring its own phones as soccer players, recreating goals from last week’s semi-final and final Champions League matches.
The brand created the videos within a few hours after the matches, including the final goal by Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior during the Barcelona-Juventus game Saturday night, in partnership with social video firm Burst. A replica of the stadium was built from scratch, which featured details from the official LED hoardings, to the players’ jersey numbers, to the crowds in the stands and even the “official” ball.
“While watching football, most people are double-screening,” said Bianca Spada, social media manager at HTC Europe, Middle East and Africa. “We wanted to push out reactive content that played into the key moments of the matches and further grabbed their attention.”
These Vine videos were adopted not only to promote engagement but also to promote the HTC One M9 handset to a mobile-first generation. The video following Saturday’s final has been looped more than 143,000 times on Vine. It’s the latest installment in HTC’s “Always On” campaign as an official UEFA sponsor, which HTC says has allowed the brand to engage with millions of people that it wouldn’t have otherwise reached.
Apart from Vine, HTC also took to Twitter for a broader campaign around Champions League, including a “Half-Time Challenge” trivia contest during the semifinal and final half-times. For one of Saturday’s quizzes, HTC asked fans to spot the differences between two pictures of a player. HTC gave away an HTC One M9 and a goodie bag with HTC-UEFA merchandise to the winner.
2. Two images, but how many differences? Have To Count. #HalfTimeChallenge pic.twitter.com/TJpO9RuA7O — HTC (@htc) June 6, 2015
“While we hope to experiment with Persicope soon, we have found that Twitter and Vine work very well for us in terms of our long-term engagement plans,” said Spada. And for those playing along at home, there were five differences between those photos.
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