Santander Racing
Santander is one of the world premier banks and one of the largest banks in the Spanish-speaking world. As part of Santander’s ever-increasing global presence and in-line with the bank's core values of dynamism, strength, leadership and innovation, the bank has become a large supporter and sponsor of Formula 1TM motor racing. In 2008 this sponsorship took the form of sponsoring 3 races, the Mercedes McLaren F1 team and 2008 F1 World Champion Lewis Hamilton.
Santander works closely with F1 PR specialists Sidhu and Simon, to leverage and maximize their sponsorship assets.
Brief
As part of the 2008 package, Sidhu and Simon proposed a website to support and promote Santander’s sponsorship assets. The website was to be built in approximately 3 weeks, utilizing content generated by Sidhu and Simon and to 'go live' in time for PR activities in the lead up to the British Grand Prix.
Type3 were asked to provide creative ideas and a technical solution to include…
- Supporting incoming traffic
- To highlight Santander involvement in F1
- To showcase competitions and other incentives
- To showcase car sponsorship
- To show sponsorship link with Lewis Hamilton
Our Solution
After researching F1 based websites we quickly realized that many F1 sites are essentially content heavy and have been built up over many years of data, statistics and features. All of which would have been impossible to replicate in the time frame.
As part of our research we identified the types of users that would be attracted to the site via the various PR and marketing activities. This research clearly showed our users were mainly male and aged between 14 and 35 years old. As such, and in-line with our brief, we included the following within the website...
- Developed a pit stop game in line with the British Grand Prix event activities
- The game had a leaderboard and a viral “Send to a friend” feature
- Site contained up to date season information
- Site was updated after each grand prix
- Competitions could be entered online
- Site was designed with flexible banner spaces for advertizing and site feature promotions
- Site was developed in xHTML and maintained by Type3, removing the need for a CMS
Due to the client budget, no formal SEO or PPC campaign was commissioned. All search engine traffic was generated via traditional PR methods and retained and engaged by the site.
The site was live for 5 months.
Results
- Over 13,500 unique visitors visited the site, looking at 71,600 pages
- 90% of site activity was during core Marketing/PR activity
- Average user spent 3.5 minutes interacting with the site
- Game was played over 10,500 times, by 5,700 unique users
- Over 4,470 competitions were recorded
- Low bounce rate – meaning users expectations were met
- F1 press wrote favorable reports of the site and games, which was the sole driving mechanism for traffic
- Game viral aspect enabled the game to be seeded to a wider audience
- Site was maintained by Type3, delivering an internal time/resource saving