The English Cricket board was looking for a partner to launch their brand-new cricket format The Hundred in summer 2020 and deliver a sell-out tournament with a younger, more diverse audience
Cricket fans didn’t want the new tournament and had been vocal in their criticism of the format. What’s more, young audiences felt the sport was the domain of white, middle class men and not for them.
We identified that 16-24YO love entertainment and gaming but believed cricket to be boring – we had to demonstrate how The Hundred had been designed to counter this and the speed and excitement of the new game.
Our campaign strategy mimicked the traits of an entertainment launch – creating teasers, trailers, screenings and previews – and put the young and diverse players at the heart of the story.
We unveiled the 8 national teams at a preview evet in a warehouse in East London challenging youth media and influencers to come and try out The Hundred live and excusive for the first time. Think you can manage to hit a ball bowled by Jofra Archer travelling at 90mph? Think again.
Next-up we supported the draft of 120 domestic and international players – handling junkets with the players and overseeing content capture of what was unfolding from our roving reporters for the night – Capital FM’s Roman Kemp and Love Island’s Kem Cetinay.
Our main goal was to deliver action through a shift in sentiment towards The Hundred. At the beginning of 2019, the sentiment was 9% positive, 45% neutral, and 46% negative and following the October launches the breakdown shifted to being 35% positive, 54% neutral, and just 11% negative
We increased sign-ups to TheHundred.com by 137% (the month following the launch), delivered 256 pieces of coverage and an estimated 94.9M Twitter impressions from 1.8K mentions (48 hours after the launch)
