#3 Guide to designing digital adverts sports fans want to see

Storytelling by design

Google estimates that 70% of advertising performance is driven by ad creative and it’s easy to see why. Regardless of your discount or offer, what fans see is what draws them in.

You’ve already learned how to get in front of fans with your media-buying and social content; now it’s about making sure you’re heard. But while click-through rates (CTR) give a degree of insight, actually understanding how and where you’re going right and wrong with your creative is much more complex.

You need to tell authentic stories in your ads. How? It’s all about knowing your visual stimuli – from the right messaging all the way to the color of your background and where you position copy in your designs.

Fans want to see data

We’ve touched on why data-driven content is king on social, and the same applies to display and connected TV. Live sports data is what fans want to see. It ties your brand and ads to what they care about, giving you a far better chance of catching their attention than a generic activation.

When advertising in the lead up to sporting events, game countdown clocks are a powerful asset to bring your designs to life. They create a sense of urgency for fans to purchase your products, by auto-updating in real-time ahead of kick-off.

Then, once the game is underway, it’s best to embed live scores and player stats. These data points tap-in to the sports excitement and are proven to increase CTR – they helped our client Heineken beat CTR targets by 183%.

Sports data adds brilliant context, in the same way location, weather and pricing data does.

No more guesswork

Every marketer and designer knows how difficult it can be to analyze creative performance. But it’s essential to finding those marginal gains needed to improve engagement and conversions.

Using our Creative Intelligence tool, brands can predict how fans will engage with their creative designs before they even launch. Domino’s recently used the AI technology to assess key stimuli such as motion, text density, focus and memorability to work out where to make edits and how.

As an example, while colorful designs seem aesthetic, many of our clients find that the lack of focus actually disrupts the viewer experience and ad recall, because it is difficult to identify the key product or message. These kind of insights eliminate guesswork and drive up results.

And what’s best, using the self-service template tool, designs can be easily updated in a few clicks, removing the need to go through the full design feedback process.

Scale without wasting time

When you consider just how many creative assets need to be designed to advertise around sport, it’s no surprise many brands automate much of the creative production process.

The sports world is ever-changing, yet how your ads look and what they say has to be relevant in real-time in order to cut-through the noise. And then, of course, you need to tweak size and format for every channel.

Tech, like our software, helps brands to design creative at speed and scale, and hit all channel requirements without having to hire extra designers or overwhelm their agency each time they want to adapt or change.

During the 2020 UEFA European Championship, this enabled tournament sponsor Heineken to efficiently create, data-led creative that was relevant through the entire tournament; before, during and after each game.

Customer story:
Domino's

The global pizza chain wanted to drive website purchases with dynamic video content for it social media channels, tailored to audience interests like sports and TV.

How Genius helps you win

Whatever channel you’re looking to activate on, our Content Studio enables you to create eye-catching ads for sports fans in the most cost and time-efficient way.

You can log in to design an entire campaign’s worth of assets in just one session. Our easy-to-use templates are entirely customisable and you can easily add live sports data from our official partnerships with hundreds of sports leagues.

Meanwhile, our Creative Intelligence tool is available as standard, allowing you to constantly assess creative performance and make adjustments with zero hassle.

Start engaging sports fans