The Story:

Decathlon is  an international sports retailer with 2080 stores in 56 countries.  Family-owned and founded in 1976, they are  inspired by the belief that the best sports products should be accessible to everyone. Though they already had stores throughout the UK, they approached MAG to launch a national scale brand awareness campaign to aid their business growth in the UK, as well as the opening of more stores. 

The Strategy:

To achieve brand awareness and footfall in stores, MAG needed a better understanding of Decathlon’s potential audience. Using a consumer panel designed to develop a deeper understanding of brand audiences, MAG  conducted a survey looking into the attitudes, behaviours, lifestyles and motivations of Decathlon's target demographics. Once we knew who we were targeting, we set out to make the campaign as mass reach as possible, by using contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising is multichannel and scalable, making it a reliable means for reaching audiences. According to research conducted by IAS (Integral Ad Science), almost two-thirds (65%) of UK consumers have a more favourable opinion of the brands that serve them contextually relevant ads. Additionally, more than eight in ten (81%) prefer to see ads that align with the content they are consuming. Therefore, for this aggressive national campaign, the creatives were contextually relevant dependent on area. 

As an example -   the Liverpool creative reads ‘ Hello Liverpool’; this is brand introducing itself to the whole city- making it personal and friendly. The creative also states their stores are open    ‘Eight days a week’ which is  a Beatles song, and the Beatles are from  Liverpool, so by using the word eight ( albeit crossed out), it’s a nod to the fact the brand knows it’s stuff about the city, whilst also delivering the relevant message that the store is open all week. The rest of the ad is clear and concise; it relies on the context to do the job. This was carried out nationwide on above the line formats.