Shifting the goalposts: how Beko used Reels to connect with Turkish football fans
Beko is subsidiary of one of the largest household appliance producers in Europe. It has sponsored Besiktas, one of Turkey’s three biggest football teams, since 1988. Here, the team behind this winning entry explains the thinking behind the campaign that won ‘Best Use of Instagram’ at The Drum Awards for Social Media 2021.
Besiktas has won 17 trophies, including 5 league titles until 2004. As the team’s successes went down in history, Beko has become known as the “Legendary Sponsor” in the hearts of fans. The way Beko supports its team has changed over the years. We wanted to strengthen the love between Besiktas fans and Beko, so created the first commercial film prepared on Instagram Reels and shot entirely with a mobile device, supporting it with a 360-degree Instagram campaign.
We brought a different perspective to the production approach common in Turkey, with a campaign which was born from Reels, in a way that no brand has ever tried before. By creating content powered by the dynamics of the platform like Reels commercial, Instagram AR filter, a Reels-oriented cheer song, Stories polls, lyrics video, AR ads, we established a strong connection with our target audience.
Our most important goal in 2020, which was a year full of difficulties and challenges in many ways, was to tell the fans that we are proudly back on the chest of the Besiktas jersey again. While doing this, we wanted fans to experience the love and passion they have for their team in the most exciting way.
However, all the difficulties we encountered in 2020 also negatively impacted the channels where fans came together with their teams. Therefore, we wanted to choose a channel popular with fans at this time. Instead of expressing our love for Besiktas with an ordinary campaign, our aim was to create a communication in which the fans would clearly share their feelings, participate actively and be a part of it.
Reels, Instagram’s new platform launched in 2020, was a great opportunity to achieve our goal. This new platform, which has dynamics dominated by TikTok users, is liked by many Instagram users; especially young and young adults were both consuming Reels more and more and creating new and different contents in this video format.
The Reels platform was not just a place for more fun content. It was also a fully-equipped mobile production app, starting from the shooting to the editing features, where users could produce their own content. In addition, no brand has yet released a commercial that was entirely shot and edited in Reels.
Therefore, creating a Reels project in accordance with the media dynamics of Instagram as the sponsorship communication of a distinguished, century-old football club like Besiktas was an important opportunity for the fans to experience the love and the passion they have for Besiktas in the most exciting way.
While we were designing the sponsorship project between Beko and Besiktas, we wanted not only to produce content that is highly watchable, but also to enable users to produce their own content. Therefore, while designing the communication, we did not think of it as just a single video on Instagram, but created a 360-degree digital campaign that was completely tailored for the platform.
First of all, we briefed our director accordingly and created an opening film, shot and edited with the platform’s Instagram Reels, in which only real Beşiktaş fans took part and we said “Our Love is Beşiktaş”
Making this film, shot entirely with mobile devices in Turkey, the most important thing for us was to contact the fans with an energetic, dynamic, exciting and passionate tone - one that we are familiar with in the football world. When it comes to football and fans, cheering is the most important communication element that stimulated the senses. In this context, we composed a chant performed by Kamufle, a popular rap musician (and a true Besiktas fan), in which we express the passionate love of both Beko and fans for their club Besiktas.
Apart from this, we wanted to use the features of Reels that allow users to create their own content, to increase the interaction between Beko and the target audience and to allow users to use and share the content we create. That’s why we created multiple short versions of our film and extra versions with only the lyrics of the song (the chant composed by Kamufle) so that Besiktas fans can produce their own Instagram Reels content.
In addition, we implemented the Legendary Eagle filter (inspired by the black-headed eagle, the symbol of Besiktas) by using the latest AR technology of Instagram, to allow Beşiktaş fans to share their love for their club on Instagram Story. The users were able to share their love for Besiktas on their own profiles by taking wings with the Legendary Eagle filter.
We also designed different assets in order to increase our contact points with our target audience and our interaction with them. In this context, we produced Polling content, where we asked the fans about Besiktas, alongside complementary posts such as .gif stories. To get fans to be a part of the campaign, we edited ‘How To’ videos, where we explain how they can produce content using the AR filter and cheer. In addition to all these, we have completed the campaign mesh with works such as AR Ads, which leads to the use of the AR filter.
With the first Reels project in Turkey, which is also among the world’s firsts, and created just for the fans, we said ‘Beşiktaş is Our Love’, we gave the fans wings and announced our love to millions.
Over 128m impressions, 15m views and 410,000 clicks were achieved. The AR filter has been used nearly 96,000 times, shared over 11,000 times by viewers on their own profiles. Powered by the dynamics of the Reels platform, the campaign achieved a total reach of over 20 million. According to the Brand Survey results, with an increase of 5.8 points in Ad Recall, results were achieved above benchmarks, while Message Association increased by +1.1 and top of mind awareness by +0.2 points.
This campaign was a winner at The Drum Awards for Social Media. To find out more, including which competitions are currently open for entry, visit The Drum Awards website.