The Rumpus Room didn’t recreate the anticipation and excitement of the F1 World Championship. The digital & social production agency recorded it as it happened.
Lewis Hamilton won his second F1 World Championship in Abu Dhabi on November 23. He was right to thank his fans…
“…For my fans, I always say we win and we lose together. We’ve asked for a series of clips from fans this week and when I saw it, something happened in my heart…They’ve been through thick and thin with me, they make it even more special being at the top and they make me believe I can do anything. A big thank you to them.”
…They created the campaign that made his win the most watched of the racing season.
The BBC achieved its highest Formula 1 viewing figures of the 2014 Formula 1 world championship season. Viewing peaked at 6.5 million viewers (42% share of audience) and averaged 4.7 million viewers. Earlier in the season, the Canadian Grand Prix had a peak audience of 5.2 million viewers and an average 4.6 million.
The job of creating the buzz that would glue viewers to their TVs during the qualifying and final races was given to The Sweet Shop’s digital and social production sister agency, The Rumpus Room. The agency could have recreated the anticipation and excitement of the event in an emotive film, using peak moment clips, slo-mo and music.
It did something entirely different. The agency asked Lewis Hamilton’s 7+ million fans (#TeamLH) to record their anticipation, excitement and encouragement – in real time, across four days from Thursday to finals day, Sunday. The agency was then able to record the build up to the event, again in real time, and release a powerful global #TeamLHmovie hours after the final race.
The Rumpus Room created a real-time, social/ mobile activation that allowed the agency to set video challenges, with fans reacting to real time events during the whole race weekend. In this way, the agency directed fans to tell the story from their own point of view. The final race film became a portrait of a global fan base experiencing a moment in history together. It gained over 1 million views in under 14 hours on Facebook alone.
The film series was supported by streams of bite-size social content, including a series of daily Instagram video teasers, and fan-focused images and quotes. An ‘always on’ social strategy was used across four fan base channels, supported by social outreach to ensure that key fans and influencers were involved as co-creators and ambassadors of the project.
The results were pretty spectacular. On top of the role the campaign played in the BBC’s viewing achievements, #TeamLHmovie had a reach of over 40,000,000+ during the seven day activation, and #TeamLH appeared in 68,000+ posts – almost three times as many as #LewisHamilton.
