The Challenge

Lucozade wanted to develop and solidify Lucozade Sport’s credentials with footballers and football fans. It wanted to educate amateur footballers about how the products enhance performance and introduce England international Ashley Young as its new brand ambassador.

The Idea

Along with traditional advertising, Lucozade decided that football magazine FourFourTwo would provide a highly credible platform to deliver its messaging via extensive editorial content.

The strength of the idea was enhanced by the fact that Ashley Young already appeared regularly in the title’s monthly 12-page Performance section, which aims to help amateur players improve their game.

Lucozade and FourFourTwo created a monthly advertorial, positioning Ashley Young as the first-ever player-editor (as opposed to player-manager).

As part of the Performance section, Young offered authoritative game, fitness, nutritional tips and advice in association with Lucozade, in print and online.

Video content is a key component of FourFourTwo’s product. For this reason, an interview and demonstration session with Young was included online, enabling the print product a further dimension to drive reader interaction and engagement.

To extend the reach of the campaign, the same video content was additionally hosted on the Lucozade Sport YouTube channel.

The Results

• This was a good exercise in achieving integrated brand visibility, with the bespoke editorial exposure aggregating at 565k unique users, in a single month, across multiple platforms
• Total exposure of the video ran to more than 52k views in the same period 
• Engagement metrics were very high, with the average FourFourTwo reader recording a dwell time of 5.5 minutes on the branded channel. In terms of overt brand visibility, too, Lucozade content at fourfourtwo.com was seen no fewer than 75k times