Mkt3500 - off-The-Wall Marketing: Highlight Truly Innovative Promotional Campaigns

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England has undoubtedly been one of the most innovative as well as successful sports campaign so far.

Betfair "Back Yourself" Campaign

Sports doesn't go well with gambling as we all know. There are a lot of controversies and scandals in the sports world relating to game controlling because of gambling. But can you image Betfair, the world's largest Internet betting exchange company, used their betting website for the 2015 London Marathon runners to "bet" on themselves to as a promotional campaign?

What Betfair did was that they lauched a website called "backyourself.com". Runners can log onto the website and register and then they can select a target time to finish depending on how long they think they can achieve. Thus the odds will be automatically generated after that. And if the target time is reached after the marathon, the runners will need to send a screenshot of their finish time to Betfair and Betfair will donate the winnings of the runners plus their complimentary 20-Pound stake to each runner's fundraising page. And if the time is missed, the 20 Pounds will be donated to Cancer Research UK, the London Marathon Official charity.

For this campaign, Betfair spent around 35,000 Pounds overall while the creativity behind the promotion and the great idea to link betting, sports and charity funding enabled them to promote the website and the business model of Betfair . Betfair successfully got millions of people exposed to their platform and their business model. And in the same time, all the marathon runners who participated in the betting on Betfair didn't really bet. Instead, they donated the money either to their own charity or the Cancer Research UK. It's literally a win-win for both Betfair and the marathon runners who participated in this campaign.

These campaigns mentioned above successfully built a bond with their target group and the companies that held these campaigns. They also had great impact because they stimulated the emotions of the consumers or the target market. And their successes were truly based on the usage of their greatly innovative promotional campaigns. And therefore it can be argued that innovative promotions used in a wise way and on a basis of sufficient researches can achieve great success not only in business world but also in the sports world.

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References

[1]"This Girl Can." Our Work. Sport England, n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2015. [2]"This Girl Can." Our Work. Sport England, n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.