JD sports wanted to really cut through with its young and diverse audience and make an impact at Christmas, a key time of year for the business whilst aiming to reach the audience away from the clutter and distraction of online/social media environments.
Plan
JD sports bought into Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, feeling it was the perfect launch moment for the Christmas campaign with cinema allowing the brand to showcase the ad in the highest quality environment. Collaborating with smart media and the DCM studios team, two branded idents were created to run alongside the main brand ad. The bespoke idents used footage from the original ad starring Antony Joshua, with the aim of ultimately boosting frequency of the JD sports brand and cut through within the reel.
JD sports also decided to run the full hero 120” ad in cinema during the opening week of the film and using DCM’s proximity planning tool Cinemapper tool ran this activity in cinemas closest to JD Sport’s top-performing stores. After the opening week, all cinemas would revert to showing the 30” ad to keep cover building in the run up to Christmas.
Results
The ‘King of the Game’ campaign delivered incredibly positive results for JD Sports within the target 16-24 audience in the run up to Christmas.
+17%
uplift in ad recall, reaching 70% amongst cinemagoers and well ahead of the 48% DCM benchmark
75%
of exposed cinemagoers agreed JD Sports is ‘relevant to me’ and aligns with their interests in culture, music and sport
+80%
intent to act amongst those exposed to the ad in cinema, across all creative routes
