Garanti has reached 25 million people with its new campaign for Turkish National Basketball Team
In 2001, Turkey hosted Men’s European Basketball Championship which was a significant breakthrough in turkish basketball. The same year was also important for Garanti as of being the new partner of Turkish Basketball Federation. Garanti created a huge marketing campaign for the national team with the name '12 Giant Men' which became the team’s official name which is still being used today by not just Garanti itself but also by the federation, press and the whole country.
After 16 years, Turkey hosted EuroBasket 2017 once again this September. This time, the new '12 Giant Men' which is composed of young athletes, needed a strong support. Garanti, as being the main sponsor of the team and the event sponsor of EuroBasket 2017, has started to work on a new campaign knuckled down to draw attention to both the team and the tournament.
The new campaign was prepared to focus on to integrate the support of the basketball fans with the team. Garanti got together with the one of the pioneers of the Turkish rap named Ceza and presented the new song written by Ceza to 12 Giant Men with a surprise. The smart baskets are placed on the 12 Giant Men’s training ground and programmed to play a chapter of the new song in every shot. The surprise moments of the players were recorded on the camera.
The attractive part of the campaign was that basketball fans were able to support the team by their own voices. The fans, shared their videos which they vocalize the Ceza’s 12 Giant Men song or their personal messages via social media with #DevDestek (huge support) hashtag.
With this campaign, whole country has integrated with both the team and the tournament. We gained remarkable results:
- Our hashtag became the official hashtag.
- 20.626 messages has been shared via our hashtag.
- The videos have been watched over 16 million times.
- The new song has become the official song of the national team.
- With these numbers and impression, we reached 25 million people during the campaign.
In addition to these, Garanti has created instant communication during the tournament. The contents were basically based on videos and live broadcasting. Among these contents, the post-game interviews of the athletes, live ticket contests, game highlights and the private camp videos of 12 Giant Men drew high attention on social media. The posts shared via Garanti Basketball account have reached 24,69 (Interaction per 1K fans) engagement on Facebook and %8 engagement rate on Twitter in average.
12 Giant Men left the tournament by round 16 game. No matter what the result is, the new technical staff and the young players gave us a big hope for the future tournaments. It was really important to see the support of all basketball fans either.
We are now looking forward to the 2019 World Cup Qualification Games. Garanti Bank is deeply proud of supporting turkish basketball and National Basketball Teams for 16 years.