Indeed and Eintracht Frankfurt

By MediaCom, Global HQ - London

For Indeed Brand Indeed

Highly Commended in category Sports
Marketing
& Sponsorship

In subcategory Strategy

WPPED Cream
WPPED Cream
Project Description
Indeed.com is the world’s largest job site, making it their business to put people to work. Focusing its growth on the biggest economies. Germany was a major priority market that proved a particular challenge. Up against an established local competitor, StepStone, and with a company name that doesn’t mean anything in the local language. Indeed needed something different.
Through a partnership with German football team Eintracht Frankfurt of the Bundesliga, we transformed levels of consideration (+53%) through exposure and storytelling rooted in the favourite pastime of German people (football) while at the same time accessing the biggest business hub of Germany (and increasingly Europe).
Agency Solution
In order to identify the right sponsorship and subsequent execution strategy, we used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research.
To begin with, we worked with multiple stakeholders across Indeed’s business to clearly understand how the partnership could grow the brand as well as growing the business. We established which areas the sponsorship needs to impact and then set out to utilize all research tools available to us to analyse German market.
Using TGI, we researched which interest/passion points index the highest against Indeed’s core audience (25-54 year olds). We found that football over-indexes against the audience and nothing comes close. We then set out to look at the German football market using Sports Sponsorship Insider to understand what’s available, benchmark costs and research the impact other sponsors have had with the sport.
The outcome was that only a shirt sponsorship can deliver the cut-through and national awareness that was critical to Indeed’s success.
We worked closely with our global media team to analyse recruitment and online jobs site market to establish the relationships among various competitors (StepStone, Monster). We analysed marketing and communication strategies to establish how competitors market and grow their business. This helped us identify areas of opportunity and influenced our decision to chose Eintracht Frankfurt to tap into the emotional connection that the team and sport provide.
We utilized Statista and Foresight Factory to gather further insights around preferences and trends in behaviour. This helped us understand what the audience likes around their football interests and where they are being underserved.
We performed further bespoke research in Germany to identify areas where current sponsors were leaving gaps for indeed to exploit.
We worked with econometric specialists to model potential impact on the business using sponsorship as compared to spending the same amount on a more traditional media investment.
This helped us validate the investment and the buy-in from the senior leadership at Indeed. They could clearly see a robust business case.
Having developed a bespoke framework around sponsorship fit and impact potential, we had a scoring mechanism through which we could evaluate the suitability of a partnership and inform us which areas should form the focus of negotiations.
The key takeaway after evaluating the suitability of Eintracht Frankfurt was that we needed more access to the business community, more access to players for content creation and guaranteed digital reach through club’s owned channels to ensure we reach desired national awareness. This insight put us in the driving position to negotiate the best possible deal, with execution in mind.
We then valued the partnerships using our own proprietary Connected Sponsorship tool, to have an accurate reflection of the value as it stands. This enabled us to negotiate the commercial terms which deliver the EUR 10M set out as a target. We negotiated a 12% reduction in asking price to ensure the desired ROI ratio can be achieved.
Please rotate your device
to portrait orientation