A winning combination: showcasing Ideagen to a global audience
Oct 12, 22
Anyone turning on their TV on Monday evening to watch Premier League football might have noticed the Ideagen logo flash up on the pitchside advertising boards, prompting the question: why is a B2B regulatory compliance software company sponsoring a Premier League football club?
Ideagen are Principal Club Partners of Nottingham Forest who were promoted to the top flight of English football at the end of last season, and on Monday we debuted our new digital pitch-side hoardings alongside new digital scoreboard and concourse advertising.
The answer to the question "Why?", is all in our values of Community, Adventure and Ambition.
Firstly, “Community”. Wherever you are in the world, sport is powerful at bringing people together. It’s used around the world to drive change (such as race, gender and disability equality). Ideagen has a long-standing relationship with Nottingham Forest FC which includes sponsorship of the youth academy, the women’s development squad as well as a schools’ educational programme ‘Think Big’. We invest in this relationship to help raise aspirations, demonstrate the use of technology in sport and also showcase the range of careers available in the tech sector.
And our community involvement at Ideagen isn’t isolated to football, we also sponsor Nottingham Rugby club, Trent Rockets and England women’s cricket superstar Nat Sciver – all with the ambition to break new ground and encourage social mobility.
Secondly, “Ambition”. The Premier League is considered the toughest domestic football competition in the world, attracting the best international talent. With high energy, camaraderie, strategy and drama, it’s also the MOST watched soccer league globally, streamed live into 212 countries, and 643 million homes with an estimated five billion viewers each week. Like Ideagen, it has worldwide reach. Add to this social media feeds, highlights shows, online streaming, local and national newspapers and sports magazines, it has established itself as a marketing platform for premium brands to access engaged audiences.
Some of these sporting fans will work in, or with, regulated industries, and may seek solutions to their health and safety needs, audit and risk challenges or tools to help with regulated collaboration. It presents us, as a global business, with an effective opportunity to increase brand awareness and more importantly, showcase our software solutions to people who need them.
Thirdly, “Adventure”. What Ideagen do is complex, the industries we work in are vast. Digital pitch-side advertising changes every 30 seconds and the words used have to be precise and stand out against the on-field activity, to an audience that may not understand what we do. We set our design team the challenge of explaining Ideagen visually, in a limited space, time and arena environment where people are there first and foremost to watch football.
It also had to work well on an LED screen and translate on both TV screens and live in the stadium. White doesn’t work as a background, so the Ideagen design team had to be creative with our brand colour options to ensure the logo and the messaging pop. And like Forest’s goal scorer on Monday night, Nigeria international Emmanuel Dennis, the design team rose to the challenge and hit the back of the net.
Here at Ideagen we’ll continue to adapt and innovate, looking at how we can improve our digital assets and brand awareness as the season continues. We’ll also launch new ads to further our brand story.
In the meantime, we applaud our in-house designers for a winning solution to our design challenge (an example of which you can see below) and cheer the fact a 1-1 draw got Forest off the bottom of the league table above their nearest rivals Leicester City.