Ryder Cup winners: Europe (& Paddy Power)

Sport doesn't get any better than Sunday night. Poults, Rose and the rest of the Ryder Cup team had a nation (or continent) of golfers on the edge of their seats for an entire evening.

I could go on about the golf now but instead, i'll talk about the viewing experience. It was, for a change, a viewing experience that involved commercial breaks. A live sporting event that simply couldn't be sky+'d for fear of getting a text or tweet through that would ruin the delayed viewing pleasure.

And unlike your typical football match, this action lasted around 7 hours - that's a lot of ad breaks. In fact you can assume that by 9pm, a lot of sports fans are going to be getting a little frustrated with yet another interruption to the real action.

So what do you do if you're a brand that wants to take advantage of this prime time audience?

1. You could take a few slots to avoid wear out and hope you time it right abd get remembered

2. You could play the same ad in every break to really guarantee cut through, the downside of which could be wear out and annoyance, resulting in the Sunday night viewer even taking a negative perception of the brand away with them (thank you very much citi bank).

3.  Or you could make a virtue out of the regular breaks. Deliver a bit of unexpected entertainment. Mix it up a bit through each break. Maybe even integrate with the conversation on twitter, or even better, tie it into the live action itself.

Step forward Paddy Power.

They used five stunt planes to "write" tweets sent by members of the public in the sky above the Ryder Cup course in Chicago. The twitter messages were more than 200ft tall and served to "redress the balance" against the vociferous home crowd backing the US team.

It did the trick over the weekend. The stunt itself generated huge amounts of PR for the brand, even Rory was impressed...

But it was more than just a PR stunt, it gave the fans themselves a voice from this side of the pond. User Generated Content can often mean brands asking way too much of people with little or no incentive for them to bother, often resulting in a select group taking part with little impact on the wider audience.

Paddy Power on the other hand utilised a mix of channels to ensure that rather than a select few participants and live fans seeing it (as is typically the case with similar ideas such as Nike Chalkbot), the brand engaged hundreds of thousands more people through their clever use of mass media to invite participation throughout the event itself.

On the night, Paddy Power seemed to be the only brand thinking about their communications from the consumer's point of view; how people felt, what people were doing and what they would be likely to do if encouraged. On a night like sunday,well worn incentives go out of the window. People don't want cash rewards or prizes for getting involved. They just want to show their support and feel part of the event itself. So making the output a physical reality at the course itself was inspired.



A slightly more controversial example adorning
the wallpaper of the Paddy Power Twitter feed

A one off guerrilla stunt in the skies of Chicago would have been a nice PR story (and it certainly achieved plenty of that). But by broadcasting an invite through TV and encouraging people to get involved by doing very little differently (approx 60% will have been online while watching the action anyway), they were able to produce a much more effective piece of comms. Something that didn't just engage a minority of participants but entertained the viewing majority as well.




A Paddy Power tweet gets live coverage on Sunday night