Co-Succes Story: Playable x Many Digital
This Co-Succes story is a repost of the article shared on Playables website.
MANY Digital uses gamification
to drive app downloads
and activating sport sponsorships
digitally
Many Digital is a software company that offers its white label app and custom platform to sports teams and divisions, with the aim of transforming their businesses and driving revenue. Because they work in the triangle of sports between club, fans and sponsors, Many Digital needed an all-in-one platform, connecting the club and fans in an engaging sports community. They also created a space in which sponsors can activate their sponsorship in a new and digital way. With a white-label app solution, the club can now collect first-party data about their fans, which offer deep insights into their behavior.
The challenge was, the world of sports is still very traditional and not very data-minded, often preferring the ‘old ways’ of marketing to fans, such as featuring logos on sports shirts and more analogue banners around the stadium.
Many Digital knew one thing for sure, though – fans are very engaged and very loyal when it comes to the team they support. They identified a huge opportunity to leverage this engagement to gather fan data and offer a personalised in-app experience. Many Digital wanted to improve their existing digital marketing platform with an extended gamification solution and reached out to Playable to start the collaboration.
Putting clients in the gaming seat
Many Digital worked with Playable to help sports teams engage fans in the digital sphere and to have a better digital understanding and ownership of their data. Together with one of their clients, ‘Divisions foreningen Håndbold (Top håndbold), Many Digital built a ‘League-wide app’ – an app where the top 54 Danish men and women’s handball clubs can gather together. Instead of fan data from a single-club solution this platform combined aggregated fan data from all 54 Danish clubs. Which opened up new commercial possibilities based on a broader audience.
This opened up new digital sponsorship deals for handball in Denmark, so when Many Digital suggested extending the existing platform with Playable’s game-engine platform, the answer was a clear yes! Playable’s game mechanics create even more possibilities for running campaigns for fan engagement and commercial value.
Leveraging an engaged audience
Many Digital needed to show sports teams the value of gamification by leveraging an already captive audience in a new way. With Playable’s help, they created competitions and drop games that could be personalised – with a team’s mascot, for example – and soon discovered that loyal sports fans are keen to play and willing to provide a lot of data. With high conversion rates and new ways of activating sponsorship messages in storytelling, lead generation and knowledge games the sponsors saw the revolutionized sponsorship activation possibilities. The insights that clubs gathered were not only useful for their own future targeted marketing campaigns, they also attracted new sponsors.
Gamification can elevate events
Playable’s solution led to big gamification wins at the ‘Final 4 Tournament’. With 15,000 fans in sports halls across two days, Many Digital activated fans before sports fixtures and during breaks, combined offline and online marketing efforts (such as using screens in the halls to direct fans to in-app games), and increased the event’s reach by including app users not physically present.
Many Digital and Tophåndbold won 12 big sponsorship deals for the Final 4 Tournament by offering ‘digital packages’ involving gamification, including personalised drop games, ‘win on your ticket number’ competitions, and ‘Man of the Match’ polls. Fans played multiple games and loved the combination of in-person stands and online games.
Why does Playable work for Many Digital?
Personalisation is power! For Many Digital’s clients, the ease of using Leadfamly’s platform to create personalised games gave them a low-effort way to see the massive benefits of gamification for themselves. The simple-to-use platform is a powerful tool that enables teams of any size to add personalised features (like their home colors, mascot or sponsored messages), make background changes, and gain data insights from fans. Being fully customisable, a single game can be repurposed to fit a new campaign strategy or event with ease.
Playing the long game
Using gamification to engage fans offers more than short-term wins. Many Digital has also added an extra layer of marketing insight for their clients to help them grow as a club in the future. By working with fans within the app over a longer period of time, sports clubs can generate a specifically targeted group of people, opening the doors to larger partners and sponsors – and, as a result, revenue.
The next step: diversifying their sports portfolio
With strong gamification results to show to teams in other sports, Many Digital’s next step is to add a wider range of sports to their roster. Currently working in the worlds of football and handball, they have their sights set on ice hockey, volleyball, and even kayaking.
