EE hopes to boost appeal to ‘young, tech-savvy crowd’ with Wembley sponsorship push

The series aims to promote EE’s Wembley sponsorship by giving 28 YouTube stars the chance to play a match at Wembley Stadium. Dubbed ‘The Wembley Cup’ and created by Poke, it will follow the vloggers as they train for the match through challenges such as yoga and “footgolf”, which involves playing golf with a football.

Speaking to Marketing Week, EE’s brand director Spencer McHugh said the campaign is “new territory” for the mobile operator. While it has previously used vloggers such as Jamie Oliver and Dan and Phil, McHugh said this was its first “real collaborative effort” with a YouTube star.

Spencer FC, who captains one of the teams, came up with the initial idea and then worked with EE, Google and YouTube to get other vloggers involved.

The series will run every week until 8 August, with EE promoting it through teaser clips across digital and social.

“We are treating it like a piece of branded content that we can push across all channels. Ultimately we hope that the content is what people are interested in,” said McHugh.

The aim is amplify the Wembley partnership to ensure more people know about EE’s sponsorship, as well as push its own products and services to the YouTube audience. The series includes references to EE products such as its “4G Action Cam”.

McHugh claimed reactions to the sponsorship, which EE and Wembley signed a year ago, have so far been positive and allowed EE to “push the boundaries of what is possible with technology and our network”. For example at the FA Cup final EE introduced an app that gave users access to multiple camera angles so they could watch replays and the action from different angles.

“This was a small trial but it offers insight into what might be possible in the future. We will continue to invest in the network to try and make sure we are ahead of the competition in terms of speed and to find new and interesting ideas and angles,” he said.