Why sports advertisers need contextual data-driven creative at Euro 2024

Major international tournaments like UEFA Euro 2024 bring with them a competitive advertising battle. While the teams go head-to-head on the pitch, advertisers compete fiercely for fan attention, making standing out from the crowd a genuine challenge. Greater competition drives up inventory prices, hiking the cost of converting football fans at the largest football event of the year.

With 70% of campaign performance in today’s market driven by ad creative (Google Labs), the evolution of sports fan engagement shows that a smart combination of live sports data, personalisation and dynamic real-time content will be vital for advertisers this summer.

Football fans are a highly engaged audience that increasingly consumes content online. In fact, 77% of sports fans say they participate in at least one other activity while watching a game, such as looking up stats, using social media, or playing fantasy sports (Deloitte).

With second-screen viewing so prevalent, it's all about relevance and context when it comes to cutting through the noise and hitting your Euro 2024 KPIs.

Live sports data is key

Whether you’re targeting football fans on social, display, CTV, or DOOH, creating dynamic real-time ads that relate to the live tournament or game narrative is a proven strategy to maximise results.

Football fans will see thousands of ads from June 14's opening game between Germany and Scotland all the way until July 14's Final. By embedding live sports data such as live scores, kick-off countdowns and goal scorer updates, brands can produce and deliver hyper-contextual ad creative at every given moment.

For example, targeting England fans with an ad variant that includes the live score and a message involving Jude Bellingham, seconds after the midfielder opens the scoring will capture fan attention, increase share of voice and, crucially, building a meaningful rapport with fans at a powerful time.

The emotion of the live game presents an unmatched opportunity. Over 80% of sports fans use a second screen while watching live sport. Live data enables brands to trigger omni-channel ad delivery at game-defining moments, like after every goal, to own the conversation when it matters most.

The result is increased viewability, better CTRs and higher conversion rates. This was evident at UEFA Euro 2020 when Heineken saw a 183% CTR rise and a 2x brand association, by delivering contextual live messaging to fans across social media. All ads aligned the live match status, with dynamic content like live scores and team flags ensuring relevance in real-time.

Win with hyper-personalisation

With a major international tournament comes a broad and varied fanbase. Fans of the tournament will support different nations, have different favourite players, live in different territories and speak different languages.

Not tailoring your ad creative is an opportunity lost. Advertisers need to first segment their audiences when targeting across social and programmatic channels, and then deliver tailored ad variants with relevant, localised and personalised messaging based on factors like:

• Favourite team

• Upcoming fixtures

• Purchase history

• Location

• Time of day

• Day of the week

• Weather

Meanwhile, with so many brands vying for the same audiences, telling a story with the timing of your ads is crucial. There’s nothing worse than a disjointed campaign where fans see unrelated ads and repetitive content.

By aligning ad creative with media buying strategy, brands can build a bi-directional conversation with fans; ensuring ads follow a logical sequence and always relate to the individual’s favourite team, the tournament schedule, previous results, upcoming fixtures and many other contextual factors.

At the previous UEFA European Championship, Pringles beat targets by serving 1,000+ data-driven videos to fans in six local languages across six territories. It’s never been easier to personalise and tailor hundreds of ad variants at scale, with dynamic elements like location and team logo that auto-update within creative templates.

Optimise with AI in real-time

Such is the size of the football advertising opportunity, over 1.5 billion global views watched the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup final, with World Cup social media posts generating 5.95 billion engagements according to FIFA.

In light of this summer’s lucrative advertising opportunity, brands need real confidence in their creative strategy. Using AI, many advertisers are now optimising creative design based on past performance and user insights (sports audiences behave differently to other demographics) to maximise the impact of ads both pre and in-flight.

With major football tournaments so fast-paced and rapidly changing, this provides a huge advantage. A team can go from a shoe-in to progress through the Group Stage to facing the jeopardy of an early exit in a matter of minutes and the better your brand can capture what fans want to see and hear, the greater return you’ll earn.

Our ad platform, as an example, includes a creative intelligence tool that considers motion, images, text density and memorability in real-time. For Domino’s, this drove a 20% increase in ROAS.

Preparing your Euro 2024 strategy?

The unique nature of live sport means advertisers need an equally unique marketing strategy for UEFA Euro 2024 – and the approach to ad creative is one of the most crucial pillars to get right.

For more than a decade, Genius Sports has supported advertisers in driving creative performance and optimising media buying at major sporting events.

When it comes to creative, our platform brings live sports data into our easy-to-use dynamic ad builder so you can easily create hyper-contextual, personalised assets and automate real-time delivery across social media, every programmatic channel and connected TV.

Regardless of who lifts the trophy on July 14, the brands that embrace how today’s football fans engage will be winners.