How Team Canada Enhanced their Fan Experience During the Olympics with Rover
Here's How Team Canada promoted their athletes during the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games
Overview
Team Canada is comprised of some of the nation’s greatest athletes each competing on the world’s greatest stage, putting on an incredible display of athleticism and making each of their sports seem effortless.
Heading into the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, Team Canada was determined to find new ways to promote their athletes in an engaging way on digital.
Team Canada used Rover to create over 60 mobile experiences during the four-month timeframe from Nov 2017 to Feb 2018. The platform helped the organization increase their social media engagement, their website traffic, and more importantly, helped them engage their fans across the world.
“Based on the number of opens and number of screen views, clearly a lot of people were engaging beyond the first screen and continuing through the content to see it as a whole,” added Nadolny.
“A lot of the pages we pointed to got really big results,” added Nadolny. “Based on the number of screens viewed we could tell that a lot of people got to the end screen and we were really happy with the outcome.”
A good example of this is observed in their incredible Tessa and Scott quiz, where Team Canada polled their fans on their knowledge of the figure skating duo. They created a 15-screen, 5-question quiz that, in addition to getting solid online engagement, also received over 8,300 opens with over 71% of their audience making it to the end screen. What was even more incredible was that over 23% on that end slide decided to click through to their website.
Why Team Canada
Used Rover
Team Canada chose to use Rover to find new ways to engage their fans through their social media channels and within their digital fan club. They chose the platform due to how easy it was to create engaging content and because of the product’s flexibility to create unique activations their fans would enjoy.
“One of our main KPIs during the 2018 Winter Games was with regards to the fanclub and trying to improve the engagement we were offering our fans. Whereas we had simply relied on contesting in the past, we wanted to make it truly about engagement.”
Mark Nadolny
Team Canada’s Digital Product Specialist
“What we really liked about the Rover experiences is that they were able to educate our fans in a fun way.”During the four month span, Nadolny and his team created over 60 different experiences, focusing primarily on game and athlete previews, recaps, and quizzes. The aim of each experience was to educate their fans about their athletes, the sports, or the results.
How Team Canada
Used Rover
Team Canada shared each of their experiences to their large social media following, particularly focusing on Twitter, where they received tremendous results in replies, retweets and click throughs to their mobile campaigns.
“We have over 2 million followers on our social media channels and are happy to have distribution channels we can rely on,” noted Nadolny. “With regards to the sharing of our experiences, Twitter was a big piece for us. We were impressed by the engagement we received on the posts and the experiences and quizzes themselves.”
Nadolny added that he liked how the majority of their experiences were multi-screen. Instead of just driving to a landing page or image, Team Canada created activations that either required their fans to continue scrolling to the end of a well-executed piece of content, or to continue clicking through multiple screens of a quiz or activation. By putting a strong call-to-action to visit their website at the end of each experience, the organization was able to guide their users to continue consuming their content.
Team Canada’s Use of Rover for Templating
The organization chose the Rover platform due to its ease of use not only in the creation of each experience, but also in creating similar experiences using templates.
“What we liked about Rover was our ability to do a templated approach, where we came up with a few different templates, focusing specifically on quizzes, sport previews, game previews and game recaps,” stated Nadolny.
“It was great to be able to create and use these templates as it allowed us to minimize the amount of creation work involved and helped us stay consistent and on brand.”
Templating was a huge factor as Team Canada creates their content in both of Canada’s official languages – English and French. The ability to simply copy an experience and change the verbiage was something that the organization loved – and so did their fans.
“For us, a lot of the time we start by writing our content in English and then translating it into French. With regards to these experiences, we would create them in English, quickly copy the experience, translate the copy, and simultaneously launch them in both languages.”
Their focus on all of their fans – not just those that spoke one language or another – paid off as engagement was solid in both languages. For instance, their curling quiz, dedicated to teaching their fans about both the sport and their teams, ended up being one of their top posts and experiences (in both languages) collectively receiving more than 24,000 screens viewed.
“In addition to the figure skating and hockey content doing really well, curling was another primary sport for us. If you look at the top five experiences, curling was number four. With it being one that we created early on, it was great to see and something we were really happy with.”
The Results
Receiving more than 250,000 screens viewed, Team Canada was incredibly happy with their engagement and interaction level they received from their Rover-created experiences. While the organization admitted that how recognizable the athletes and their respective sports were did play a factor in how engaging they were, they did find that they received higher engagement rates due to their ability to quickly create the content and immediately promote it to their large social media following.
“Having looked through a lot of data, several of our top posts were related to figure skating. Also, unsurprisingly our hockey content did very well as hockey continues to drive conversation in Canada. Thanks to social media, topics of discussion can bubble up and explode with the name recognition of certain athletes. Being able to create content quickly to capitalize on these moments was great.”
Going forward, as they look towards future Games and events, Nadolny highlighted how the engagement they received was something Team Canada will definitely want to emulate again. He also added that in addition continuing to push for fan engagement, there could also be a strong opportunity for additional revenue through sponsoring these content pieces.
“We saw how much potential our content can have when it’s done with the fan in mind. We would love to find some unique ways to integrate our partners seamlessly into these experiences, in a way that provides increased value to them, as well as our fans!”
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Photo Gallery
Team Canada & Rover By The Numbers
From Nov 2017 to Feb 2018
47,297
Opens
62
Experiences
8,387
Total opens
6,957
Started Quiz
4,932
Finished quiz
309K+
Screens viewed
257k+
Buttons clicked
1,113
Clicked to website
Client Testimonials
“We saw how much potential our content can have when it’s done with the fan in mind. We would love to find some unique ways to integrate our partners seamlessly into these experiences, in a way that provides increased value to them, as well as our fans!”
Mark Nadolny
Team Canada’s Digital Product Specialist.
