Starling Bank

Creating the UK’s first Fantasy Football for the Women’s EUROs

As the only UK bank founded by a woman, Starling knows only too well what it’s like to challenge a traditionally male-dominated world. And with the UEFA Women’s EUROs approaching, we needed a campaign to support the bank’s sponsorship of the tournament and to broaden representation for Women’s football.

180

media hits

75m+

Combined media reach

dedicated players

Tackling the issue

All major Men’s football tournaments have Fantasy leagues – more than nine million people alone play the Men’s Fantasy Premier League – yet the same didn’t exist for the women’s game. We wanted to change this, launching the first ever Football Fantasy for the UEFA Women’s EURO to create even more engagement in the tournament.

It made sense for Starling to own a game that helps people sharpen their budgeting skills and gets them talking about women players.

And given media exposure for male players outweighs that of women players by nearly tenfold, it was crucial that our campaign helped to star-build, boosting the profiles of the Lionesses themselves.

Kick-off

Our Fantasy Football promotion and star-building programme went hand-in-hand.

We created a suite of rich assets including photography of Lionesses Rachel Yankey, Lauren Hemp and Jill Scott playing the game and briefed them on how it worked. This featured as the news hook and main message as we secured interviews in key sports slots including Sky Sporks News, Football Insider and FourFourTwo, as well as consumer homes such as You Magazine, Observer Monthly and Lorraine.

We also targeted 100 top influencers – individuals, commentators, and organisations – with Alex Scott, The Durham Wildcats and Let’s Talk FPL, the UK’s leading fantasy football community, backing the campaign.

Score for Starling Fantasy

We delivered significant earned and social media exposure for Starling, in one of its broadest reaching PR campaigns ever.

180 media hits reached 76.5m people and the game attracted 4k+ registered players with engagement metrics well above industry average:

Sessions: 25 per player – 102,000 in total
Dwell time 66 seconds per session
631,000 page views – the game out-competed similar fantasy games with significantly larger fan audiences

“Starling was founded by a woman, Anne Boden, who wanted to break barriers in banking. They now want to break barriers in women’s football.”
Jill Scott interviewed in The Guardian

“They could go and be a sponsor for the men’s game or for other things that might possibly have been easier to get into, but the fact they want to be a sponsor for the women’s game and say that the values of the England women’s team are the values we want in our company, I thought was pretty cool. They are not just saying ‘we support women’, they have actually been through it.”