"360-degree is just the technology, not an idea"

Everything about the campaign at advertisingweek.ch/manchester-united.

Interview: Thomas Häusermann

Werbewoche: The campaign is up and running - is it working as planned?
Reto Schild: We are pleased with the many views, because these are 1:1 comprehensible figures. To date, we have over three million views on Facebook. After just half an hour, there were 500,000, and around half a million have seen the videos in the various language versions on YouTube. The numbers are quite astonishing, and we stand out a bit compared to other Manchester United videos.

Is the campaign intended to be purely viral, or will the spots also be placed?
It is a viral campaign consisting of four films based on Facebook and YouTube.

How did you come up with the idea of addressing the similarities between traders and top footballers? They're not exactly obvious ...
Yes, I think so. We've been looking after Swissquote's sponsorship involvement for some time now, previously also with Formula 1, and since the company started working with Manchester United, it's been about illuminating Big Data as a bridge between the two partners.

Football and Big Data - what does that mean?
A few years ago, at a start-up fair in Dublin, I learned about a Big Data-based technology called "Football Recruiter". Today, it is particularly widespread in the transfer market. The comparison is obvious: the starting point is data. In training, everyone is "chipped", all data is recorded. This is the perfect starting point for putting together the best possible team, anticipating injuries, and checking form.

So behind the scenes, soccer is much more technologized than you might think.
Definitely. Even in the Super League, there is now a lot of measurement. This has become a big issue in the last two or three years. The big difficulty, of course, is drawing the right conclusions from the data, being able to read it correctly. Human factors are also involved here. But compared with a bank that relies exclusively on automatically generated analyses, especially in forex trading, and thus creates the best possible conditions for a trade, the parallels are already very great.

How easy is it to implement a campaign with a global brand like Manchester United?
It was a long road. We proactively approached the stakeholders with the idea of 360° videos. It's a special idea, because usually with these kinds of sponsorship campaigns you get three players and then you have the option of staging them on a photographic basis. We came up with the 360-degree solution based on the Similarity idea. It took many meetings and conversations. Not only with Swissquote, but also with Manchester United. Fortunately, they were enthusiastic right from the start and thought they could show something different here than in other sponsoring activities.

What was the biggest challenge in the campaign?
I think the production because there has never been anything like this before. We looked at different options, checked whether you could shoot everything in a green screen and then create the backdrops in the computer using a 3D world. I quickly realized that you had to shoot on location with real studio backdrops to make it look as real as possible. You couldn't fly the players to Hamburg for a whole day to shoot tens of takes. You had to prepare everything so that the minimum time we had with the players was enough. The idea was to have 20 minutes per player ...

Read the entire interview with Reto Schild in the current Werbewoche 5/2017 of March 10, 2017. No subscription yet? Here it goes to the "License to read".