REDEFINING MEDIA DAY
When I helped launch Footballco’s flagship GOAL vertical in the US as the social & content strategy lead, I knew we needed to accomplish 3 things:
Make a splash on social, putting GOAL front-and-center on the feeds of millions of American soccer fans
Grow GOAL’s clout and connections in the US soccer space, endearing us with leagues, players, teams, and creators
Create easily refillable content formats that allowed us to stay on-time, on-budget, and within our growing team’s resources
The solution? Redefining the traditional Media Day model.
Media day is a well known commodity in sports media. Players, coaches, and influential figures around the game gather to answer questions at press conferences, speak to media in scrums, and give updates on their hopes/dreams for the upcoming season, playoffs, or Championship game. Traditionally at these days, publishers send journalists in hopes of asking a few one-off questions, relying on players to hopefully give good answers worth clipping for social. Output was limited to the number of notable moments (if any), and content was typically dated within days, especially after the game/event had passed. It works - but it’s not optimized for the modern social landscape. Our team knew this was an opportunity to innovate.
Rather than ask one-off questions, we created a system of social-first shortform video formats that gamified classic sports conversations and gave players a chance to express their personalities. These gamified formats allowed us to bank dozens of pieces of evergreen social-first video in the time it previously took to get a single quote, and helped us turn traditional player access moments into content factories.
We used this model to rapidly scale up social content production in the US, maximizing bang-for-buck on our $$ and time spend for player access. But we didn’t stop there.
Our gamified social video formats were perfect for fans, too. We put the mic in their hands outside stadiums, at watch parties, and after big games - giving them the same platform as the pros, and centering GOAL as the home for soccer not only at the elite professional level, but also on the streets. I led creation and ideation on all of our formats, helped shoot/produce/edit on the ground, led our social team on the publishing side, and occasionally stepped in to host on camera. This content strategy helped us achieve some remarkable growth within 12 months of our social team forming.
1,103 pieces of original video produced
550 million views gained across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
232k organic new followers added
$2.5M+ in branded content deals secured
Check out some examples of our fan-led and player-led video below: