Stephen Bunting

Social campaign strategy bringing together the USA’s No.1 sports app and one of darts’ biggest personalities.

The project:

On behalf of Sleeper, I worked on a social campaign with professional darts player Stephen Bunting.

The opportunity was clear: bring Bunting into the football content world in a way that felt natural, entertaining and genuinely suited to social, rather than feeling like another traditional sponsorship.

But it was also easy to get wrong. The crossover had to feel authentic to both Bunting’s personality (+being a Liverpool fan) and Sleeper’s football audience. Jumping on the wrong trends/content styles would massively reduce the potential this crossover had.

We identified the sweet spot between the current trends in football culture and Bunting’s growing fanbase, using that insight to shape content that felt credible to his existing audience while introducing Sleeper to them in an engaging way, enough to get them to even install and use the app.

My Role:

Research & insights

Researched Bunting’s existing content, audience and personality alongside trends and demands in the football space.

Audience strategy

Identified the crossover between Sleeper’s football audience and Bunting’s fanbase to shape content that could resonate with both. There is of course a big crossover between darts and football fans, so this worked very well.

Creative strategy

Worked with the team to develop short-form concepts and the sponsorship announcement, designed specifically for social.

Performance analysis

Analysed the first campaign to understand which concepts resonated, which demographics engaged best and used those insights to go onto get even better results in the second shoot.

Results:

4M+ video views

250K+ engagements

14 short-form videos

Hundreds of tracked app downloads

The Content:

Fun content: https://www.instagram.com/p/DMaLw5Dt-Nl/

Announcement: https://www.instagram.com/p/DMPdo5Ft-ce/