Bulling to Bullring challenge Proves a Hit
To kick off the new season Aston Villa FC took their new kit on a journey from Birmingham’s Bullring to Spain for The Peace Cup where it was unveiled.
The Mission to Malaga resulted in a significant amount of coverage, worth about £1m, including brand exposure for Visit Birmingham on over 100 national and international radio stations as well as national and regional press and numerous websites.
In order to leverage the sponsorship deal that Visit Birmingham has with Aston Villa we put our heads together to come up with a plan to maximise brand exposure pre-season.
We were keen to engage the club’s fans in whatever we did and really get the message out as widely as possible to fans planning to visit the city to see a game during the season.
Joining forces with other club partners, including Seat and Thomas Cook, enabled us to stage an event that really captured the imagination of both the media and supporters, with traffic to visitbirmigham.com increasing by 35 per cent.
Manager Martin O’Neill publically issued a challenge to the club’s journalists to transport Villa’s new home kit from Birmingham’s Bullring to the team’s training base in Malaga – by car.
The launch took place at Bullring Birmingham, where the new kit was loaded into the cars in a padlocked trunk overseen by Carlos Cuellar, Villa's Spanish player,then driven thorough London, Paris, Perpignan and Benidorm, before finally arriving at its destination.
Taking branded cars across England, France and Spain, with daily blogs and videos footage uploaded onto the Aston Villa website, provided a perfect opportunity to engage fans and potential visitors alike.
Holding the kit launch in Malaga also gave us the opportunity to use the Visit Birmingham branding to reach out to the ex-pat market and encourage them to rethink their opinions about Birmingham.
A mixture of local, regional, national and international media covered the story, with nightly live updates on the progress of the cars on BBC WM, interviews on talkSPORT and over 100 regional radio stations.
To compliment the stunt we ran a competition to win a weekend in Birmingham with Talk Radio Europe, the largest English-speaking station in that area of Spain.
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