New perspectives of co-creation in fan engagement: the “Giro Story”
Let’s start with a fact: the so-called “Z generation”, the first real generation of “digital natives”, deeply changed their use of images.
Let’s focus on one of the areas whose fan base is historically very active and involved: Sport. Not only the taste for sport of the younger generation is different, but their way of experiencing and consuming it has completely changed. The new “sports fans” are not just image consumers, but content creators, engaging friends and followers by modeling their stories mostly through social media platforms and communities. The simple visualization of photos and videos is no longer enough: now their greatest desire is to interact, to “co-create” and share contents with friends. Especially if this sharing takes on the healthy and sporting spirit of a competition between equals: a challenge.
In this perspective, RCS sport has decided to take some steps towards the future of the fruition of sporting events, together with Phlay. The RCS Media Group company specialized in sport business, one of the major players in the field at national and international level, took the chance of the 103rd “Giro d’Italia” bicycle race, one of the oldest and most prestigious sports events in Italy, to involve its audience into an interactive experience powered by phlay, the Italian most advanced rich media platform online for interactive audiovisual experiences. This is how “Giro Story” was born. A challenge online, sponsored by ENIT (Italian National Tourist Board), aiming to involve first and foremost users of the “Z generation” into an interactive experience that allows audiences to “customize” and “play” with the official images of the event, greatly increasing the time users dedicate to the promoted contents.
The challenge for bicycle race fans is to create an online a fully-customized version of a video about the history of the “Giro d’Italia”. Starting from four different storylines flowing simultaneously, corresponding to the origins of the “Giro d’Italia”, the legends of the “Giro d’Italia”, the champions of today and the Italian landscapes crossed by the participants in the race, any single user has the possibility to “remix” in real time the four different videos, switching from one to another at will, on the rhythmic basis of a music of her choice, synchronizing images with phlay rich media online technology. The result is soon published, and voted by the fan community of the “Giro”, who live in this way a tangible rewarding experience. The customized video is also immediately shareable through any social media or messaging platform, exponentially multiplying the visibility of individual contents.
“Giro Story” is obtaining, as expected, a great success: every day many videos created by the fans of the event are put online and voted by the fan base. Allowing the audience to personalize content and interact with the story by “rewriting” it according to the user’s own taste, the use of phlay’s online rich media platform increases the time that site visitors spend on promoted content by about 40%. With the “Giro Story” challenge, RCS Sport achieved three fundamental objectives: feeding its fan-base by orienting its communication towards the “Z generation” tastes and habits; involving in an exciting experience the audience in order to enhance the presence of its own sponsor, ENIT, by promoting the formidable beauty of the Italian landscape in customized videos; have the opportunity to profiling more precisely its active and truly engaged fan-base.
Phlay’s CEO Mario Amura is absolutely convinced that this type of interactive experiences can represent the future of advertising campaigns in the major sectors of entertainment and culture: “Our current mission is to engage in our philosophy of “playing pictures” business companies as well as institutions: with “Giro Story” and the collaboration with a company of enormous prestige like RCS Sport, we have proved to be particularly successful in sports engagement, tourism promotion and entertainment. We hope in the future to develop partnerships that will allow us to increasingly experience the phlay platform in interactive adds campaign in many other areas of excellence, such as fashion and automotive”.
