BBC 5 live Football Player

Brief

BBC 5 live approached Clock with the task of increasing the radio station's appeal to a younger audience and to encourage this audience to increase engagement with the station's content.

Clock's primary target was to raise brand awareness among 14 - 25 year-olds and to promote a more diverse listenership. In particular, BBC 5 live wanted to increase online interaction and to build a loyal community who listen to the live radio coverage via the 5 live website, download podcasts and use BBC Sport Online's football content.

Interpretation

As a result of analysing 5 live's objectives, Clock made the following recommendations:

• Reposition the 5 live brand by injecting a fresh and progressive energy into its online content.
• Engage a younger demographic whilst encouraging repeat usage.
• Integrate the audio and visual content to produce greater impact and accessibility.
• Transform the delivery of 5 live content from a 'push' to 'pull' method to empower the user with the ability to receive the content they want, when and where they want it.
• Rather than bring the users to the content, 5 live had to bring the content to the users.

Solution

Clock built The Football Player, an interactive content distribution application that allows users to customise multiple feeds. Users can now tailor 5 live content according to their favoured team, league and content type.

Users can customise the look and feel of their application to take advantage of the tribal nature of football, allowing fans to produce their version of The Football Player dedicated to their team.

By building the system in an accessible and scalable format, Clock allowed users to resize it to suit their requirements and the BBC to scale it to other devices in the future. The Football Player also enables users to consume video and audio content, both 'on-demand' and in 'live' format.

The application was embedded within large football fan communities such as high traffic football forums, club communities and social networking sites, so fans can share their experience of The Football Player with their friends. They can broadcast their locked version of the application across the internet to suit their specific interests.

Results

The application's outstanding success is reflected in the fact that it has replaced the 5 live Football homepage. It is now a central aspect of users' BBC 5 live experience.

The online PR process has generated more referrals to the 5 live portal from third party sites than from the entire BBC portal.

During this period, visits to the 5 live website have also increased by a massive 300%.