Investec are a specialist international banking group offering services in asset management, capital markets & investment banking. They have committed to a three-year sponsorship deal with the English cricket team, through until the end of the 2009 Ashes Series in England.

How to drive awareness of Investec and their involvement with cricket and the fact they were the title sponsor of the 3 match Sri Lanka test series at the end of 2007. This was not about driving responses through to the Investec site. Rather we needed to find a way to reach the right people and increase their awareness with a limited budget of £20,000.

There’s a huge amount of cricket coverage online from specialist sites through to broadsheet analysis. We decided to focus on quality coverage that would deliver both associational value and innovation. We needed to make sure that the people who were accessing the content were the right people for Investec.

We took full sponsorship of Times Online's Cricket section, dominating it for the duration of the Test Series. We also supported this with a behaviourally targeted ad campaign aimed at people who had been to the Times Business and Cricket sections within the previous month – the aim being to reach a broader and still relevant audience.

Half a million cricket fans interacted 1.25m times with our campaign.
Spontaneous awareness of Investec being the series sponsor jumped from 4% to 9%. And 10% of people exposed to the campaign ‘strongly’ associated Investec with the series.