Brand-e Campaigns Panel on Euro 2012

Brand-e asked my fellow panellists and me about our views on activity around Euro 2012 ... Castrol, you was robbed!! Below is an extract (and here's the full article from brand-e)

“Castrol have shoe-horned a celebrity into an ill-conceived campaign, which says nothing about them and creates no lasting connection with their audience or the Euros. Anything with Ronaldo in it gets YouTube views, Castrol’s spend has got them very little.”

“The live event looks interesting – letting people use their votes live is not new – but doing it with a world class footballer would have been dramatic,” says Nadya Powell at Dare. “Post event – there are videos showing how cool the live event was. But outside of numbers of people who played or watched, I’m not sure Castrol could, hand on their heart, say this achieved much for them. Except make a large hole in their budget.

“The idea is, I suppose, based around performance – Castrol is a superior performing oil and Ronaldo is a superior performing footballer,” she adds. “It’s pretty tenuous and I reckon most people are much more interested in Ronaldo’s performance than Castrol’s. And reading the write-ups, this does indeed seem to be the case – very quickly Ronaldo was bigger than Castrol and the event became about Ronaldo not Castrol.”

“Castrol is not really getting its money’s worth out of Ronaldo – it’s tricky not to be eclipsed if there’s so little natural fit,” says Sabine Stork, of Thinktank International Research. “I have the impression that a sports or drinks brand would find it easier to be seen and hence better reap a little reflected glory from one of the world’s best players than a mere motor oil.”