The Volvo Ocean Race is one of the world’s most grueling sailing competitions. Covering more than 40,000 nautical miles, it takes nine months to complete and features teams of nine crewmembers who sail for more than 20 days at a stretch to win the coveted trophy.
SCA, the hygiene and forest products company, created an all-female team to go head-to-head with the other all-male, crews. To help them, SCA employed Accenture’s digital services to give the crew an edge—both online and offline.
Race Map
There's no doubt that technological innovation continues to improve performance in sports, and in all other aspects of life. But not all of those improvements happen onboard. Team SCA needed to improve their online game as well, ensuring that critical target audiences were engaged in the race and able to follow results, meeting one of the main objectives of increasing awareness of the SCA brand.
Eighty percent of SCA´s consumers worldwide are women. And in order to connect to its brands like TENA, Tork, Libero, Libresse, Lotus, Tempo and Vinda, SCA wanted to boost the profile of their all-women crew for the Volvo Ocean Race. That meant translating the grueling on-board experience online to a global audience. To bring the excitement of the sea to land-based consumers. Based on a depth of experience in digital, Accenture was chosen to help raise visibility for the team in web and social media channels.
To help Team SCA connect to its global consumers, Accenture established a center that delivered digital monitoring and analysis of Team SCA’s performance across relevant marketing channels.
Measuring success
Accenture supported Team SCA in establishing a custom made report with KPI’s to measure the success of the digital project. On a real-time basis, Accenture monitored channels and responded to questions and engaged with followers.
Social sharing
To drive fans to different channels, onsite optimization such as video and photo suggestions, content translations and cross platform marketing activities and paid search were employed. Accenture also assisted in identifying digital influencers and bloggers for each stopover port. They were encouraged to tweet or blog about Team SCA.
Online metrics
Regular analytics reports were generated that compared Team SCA’s performance in each online channel with rival teams and against specific KPI’s. New goals were set according to target audience, geographical location, age and gender. And issues were spotted so that the campaign was constantly refined based on social media insights.
Team SCA achieved many of its goals in terms of increasing awareness of the company’s brand family and SCA itself. Messages were spread through social media, the Team SCA website and through the app.
Social Media: Team SCA gained over 100,000 followers on Facebook, while digital influencer posts reached 42 million.
Website: Site garnered more than 494,391 visitors during the course of the Volvo Ocean Race generating more than 2 million page views.
App: Loyal fans followed Team SCA during all of the race legs via the app. The total number of sessions for both Apple and Android totaled 88,319.