ShowHeroes – a global leader in digital video, offering content, technology, and sustainable advertising solutions – brought it home for EV powerhouse BYD this summer, using a top-performing video campaign to leverage the UEFA Euro 2024 Football Championship as a key cultural moment. 

The ShowHeroes team worked alongside creators from BYD and media agency, RocketMill, part of PMG, to put the world’s largest manufacturer of electric and plug-in-hybrid vehicles front-of-mind for millions of football fans – as it eyes expansion in the core target markets of the UK and Germany.

As anticipation around the Euros hit fever-pitch in two of the world’s most passionate football nations, ShowHeroes sought to capitalise on the moment via the use of over a dozen tailored creatives. 

For each game involving the Three Lions or the German squad – from group stages to knockouts and the championship final – the team built digitised dynamic countdown features that kept track of the number of days and hours to their next Euros showdown. 

The aim was to capture the national mood of excitement in both countries, driving emotional engagement with a combination of online video, rich media formats, and advanced semantic targeting. The latter ensured that BYD ads reached the most relevant audiences across sports and car categories, mobilising ShowHeroes’ network of premium publishers. 

"BYD is currently rivalling Tesla to become the world’s biggest EV carmaker – with trailblazing technology that deserves to be presented in a state-of-the-art campaign," says Georgie Meredith, agency director at ShowHeroes. "We saw an opportunity to align BYD with a seismic cultural event; one that drew nearly 20 million viewers for the England final alone. 

"Our goal was to maximise audience engagement online using a series of customised, high-impact videos and activations," Meredith adds. "The countdown design, in particular, really helped to grab audience attention during the most talked-about moments of Euro 2024. And it was enhanced by our ability to contextually place the ads, using accurate and sophisticated semantic targeting tech to find the best content segments for BYD messaging." 

Collaborating with BYD and RocketMill on the creative, ShowHeroes deployed two of its high-impact video formats, the Branded Player and Mobile Scroller, as a canvas for next-level brand awareness. This enabled the EV maker to roll out its digital campaign in a multiscreen, responsive way. It could dial up the creative impact of its activations, while seamlessly integrating with a range of online content. 

Results were a back-of-the-net success, with brand awareness metrics significantly outperforming KPIs. The creatives prompted a 24% spike in brand recall, an 88% increase in brand consideration and a dramatic 187% lift in brand image as a result of the campaign. And the high-impact formats drew a top audience engagement rate of 44%.

"ShowHeroes delivered an exceptionally well-executed concept, producing countdown lead creatives for us across online video and high impact mobile formats in highly contextual environments, at the most relevant movements around the tournament," says David Wreford-Glanvill, head of media at BYD. "The dynamic countdown assets drove attention and engagement whilst promoting the BYD brand, our Euros 2024 partnership and the launch of our new model. It's the perfect blend of creativity and strategy that has garnered impressive results."

ShowHeroes’ and RocketMill’s Euros campaign arrived at a pivotal time for BYD. Having celebrated staggering year-on-year growth of over 60% in BEV (battery-electric vehicle) and hybrid car sales last year, the company now has ambitions to become a dominant EV player in Europe, as well as China. 

With the Euro campaign delivering strong memorability and creative success, BYD and RocketMill are already planning other, similar collaborations in the future. 

"We have been really impressed with ShowHeroes and enjoyed working closely with the team for the run-up and duration of the Euros 2024 tournament," says Brendan O’Connor, senior programmatic manager at RocketMill. "They produced numerous custom creatives with a daily plan to deliver 20 outstanding online video creatives and eye-catching high-impact formats."

ShowHeroes Group

ShowHeroes is a global leader in digital video content, tech, and advertising solutions. The company was founded by Ilhan Zengin, Mario Tiedemann, and Dennis Kirschner in 2016 with headquarters in Berlin and employs more than 400 people worldwide in ...

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