Lagardère Sports’ OneCheer campaign at last year’s AFF Suzuki Cup has won the gold award at the 2017 MARKies Award for “Best Idea – Sports Marketing” – beating four other agencies to the prestigious prize.

Held on April 26 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, MARKies Awards is one of Singapore’s largest award shows, dedicated to celebrating the work of the country’s most innovative, creative and effective marketing campaigns.

Lagardère Sports came up with an idea to turn the AFF Suzuki Cup engagement experience into one, giant cheering competition to rally football fans around the region. Since some fans were unable to attend the matches physically, OneCheer aimed to virtually unite football fans in each country by invoking their competitive spirit against other nations.

The main thrust of the execution was a web-based app experience hosted on the AFF Suzuki Cup website where local fans in each market could view sample videos of their country’s football cheer and upload a file of themselves cheering their country’s football cheer. The competition’s tagline was: “Let’s come together and support one team! All you have to do is cheer, and you can stand to win an ultimate AFF Suzuki Cup experience.”

The winning fan with the most creative submission was rewarded with an all-expense paid trip to the AFF Suzuki Cup Final in Thailand as well as VIP access to a training session. There were also 20 consolation winners who won AFF Suzuki Cup goodie bags with limited edition merchandise.

The results of the campaign were stunning with a big jump across the board in both media and PR value. The tournament recorded a double-digit increase of 47.5% in overall media value as well as a whopping 252% increase in online news mentions.

The 2016 AFF Suzuki Cup was the most-watched sports programme of the year in Indonesia and Thailand; in fact, viewership figures in Indonesia eclipsed that of global sporting events like the UEFA EURO 2016. In those two countries, the 2016 AFF Suzuki Cup was also the second most-watched programme of the year.

Watch the OneCheer winner's experience video here: https://www.facebook.com/affsuzukicup/videos/1514669118562217/