Texaco FC comes to an end

I've been working on a project for Fast Track client Texaco called Texaco Fan Central (FC) The idea was simple, connect football fans with the brand by creating content that they can't get anywhere else. Texaco is seen (by most people, me included) as old fashioned, over priced and located in places that you don't normally need petrol. Sponsoring lower league football was never going to reduce the cost of a litre at the pump or mean you don't have to drive 15miles out of your way to fill up at the big red star but it kind of makes sense - traveling fans, clubs that are slightly off the beaten track, connecting the emotional journey with the physical journey, etc. etc.

So we created Texaco Fan Central - a Facebook hub where fans can talk about their team and the league. We employed Soccer AM's John 'Fenners' Fendley along with a couple of predators (producers and editors) also of Soccer AM fame - Neil Smyth and Robbie Knox to do the filming and production. The great thing about these guys is that they have experience of creating social media friendly content and they have worked in football and therefore know both the audience and some of the players and the players know (or recognise) them. So what then...?

We started filming. The format was thus; 2 players and a manager at every club, the players are interviewed by Fenners for either Car-e-oke (Cars & Music - you see what we did there?) or Away Days (stories about team away trips) and the gaffer would be asked questions sourced from fans through Twitter for As the Boss - one of the other good things about working with football semi-celbs is that they have big Twitter followings. It started slowly as we got in to the swing of seeding the content with the clubs and club bloggers, regional media etc and the guys worked the format out so that we got the most from the players. The first few clubs, Portsmouth, Bristol City, Barnsley, Reading, all got reasonable coverage and some good content helped. This one is our first Car-E-oke which gave us something that the fans would really talk about...

A lot depended on what came up in the interview and the mood the players were in on the day and the mood that Fenners was in too. On balance Car-E-oke worked better than Away Days did because it allowed more margin for behaviour like Karacan's and as we'll see, it lead to some outrageous events down the line. Away Days always tended to be a more straightforward interview with the odd funny anecdote like George Friend's bus behaviour...

I liked Ask the Boss simply because the agenda was set entirely by the fans and fans don't often get the opportunity to talk to the club manager, even if we rarely asked about football...

It also meant that I got to meet the nicest man in football, Nigel Adkins, you'll have to visit www.youtube.com/TexacoUKFC to see part 2! Splitting the content in 2 also worked well for us as we progressed with the campaign because we usually had 6mins of footage that we wanted to keep but didn't want to seed 6min clips as viewers tend to drop off after 2/3mins. By splitting the videos in half we effectively doubled the number of views which helped when reporting to a client who was counting every view, like and follower.

The campaign was a great success for many reasons, but here's a few of the key ones;

• Fans like to see their players/manager in a different type of interview. Fans also like to comment on these interviews, even if it is just to slag their rival's manager off.
• Players like to talk about something other than football and if they can relax/be put at ease, they'll give you some content worth talking about.
• When you get some content worth talking about, shout about it. Cue Craig Noone...

This was picked up by the fans who sang 'Mysterious Girl' to Nooney up at the Riverside and the Mirror posted it as their video of the day as well as plenty of blogger and regional media coverage. Craig Noone is a legend.

Finally, we decided that it was only fair to let Robbie in front of the camera (not you Neil) to say goodbye and it actually worked really well. We probably should have done it sooner!