The Big Interview – Stephan Croix

Stephan Croix, VP of Global Marketing and Partnerships at Sony Ericsson, discusses their use of social media in the recent Xperia Hot Shots campaign...

As the first year of the Xperia Hot Shots campaign comes to an end, how do you think it has gone?

Extremely well actually, we’re quite overwhelmed by its success, we started it in March 2010 and the feedback from the consumer has been tremendous. We had over three million fans watching the show on YouTube, which is fantastic in such a short time. We also have over 820,000 fans on Facebook, and when you compare that with other sports campaigns or activities it’s extremely positive.

We have been able to launch some more innovative tools as well, such as the Xperia Hot Shot application – which has been downloaded from the Android market close to 150,000 times.

It is a great achievement for us so we are really happy with the consumer feedback and the players have enjoyed it tremendously. In fact, our feedback from the whole world of women’s tennis has been excellent – they enjoyed our time on the circuit, so we are delighted with how it has gone.

How did you decide the line-up?

I remember the selection days very well, it seems so long ago now! It wasn’t easy because there were quite a few of them to choose from and they were all so talented.

The programme is about tennis meeting entertainment, so one of the criteria’s was about their degree of interest in other areas of entertainment – be it music, film, fashion or other sports.

We also wanted to promote the youth – we selected players that were up-and-coming. For example the German player we selected, Sabine Lisicki, was 220 in the world when we started to work with her, and she has reached the semifinals of Wimbledon and has worked her way up to 22 in the world.

We also looked at personalities. It was important and still is important to work with strong personalities on and off the court.

Finally, it was also essential to select players representing different countries, because we feel that the Xperia Hot Shots campaign is a truly global campaign.

So now the campaign has come to a close – how have you measured the success of the project? With handset sales or social media popularity?

A little of both actually. The main objectives around the campaign were to promote the Xperia brand and the range of Xperia smartphones we have from a Sony Ericsson point of view, but also to drive engagement with consumers. Given the figures we have achieved we feel very happy with the results and that it has contributed largely to brand-building and promotion of Xperia smartphones.

We also had ‘soft objectives’ of the campaign. We felt we needed to give fans the opportunity to get close access to their heroes behind the scenes, and also work closely with the players to support them, build up their public profile – and help them realise their dreams on and off the court.

The WTA’s social media has quadrupled over the last 18 months, do you think the rising interest levels in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc – coupled with your campaign – has assisted in the social media boom in women’s tennis?

I think the campaign has certainly contributed to it, and we have injected a lot of entertainment content into the media and offered fans never-before-seen access to the players, which people love to talk about!

With the programme I think we also attracted a new, younger audience to the sport. Women’s tennis is the biggest female sport in the world according to ratings and prize money – and we’ve really tried to attract new people to the game.

We have also allowed tennis to be a discussion topic in the worlds outside of the sport – in the entertainment communities such as film, music and fashion. But I would like to pay credit to the WTA who have been extremely open and up for innovation.

The partnership with the WTA has worked really well and they have allowed us to make the programme a success, as well as helping us promote our Xperia smartphones in a subtle and credible way to tennis fans.

How does Sony Ericsson’s Xperia campaign with women’s tennis rank against previous sporting partnerships?

I would say it is probably the strongest campaign we’ve ever done in that area. It was a project before it became a campaign. Because it was so innovative there was a lot of risk involved with it. I can’t hide it – we didn’t know if it was going to work or not!

As it turns out in the figures I have already mentioned, it was a huge success – it is the biggest thing we have done in sport so far I believe, and talking to many people in the world of tennis they would agree with that I think.

We are on the right track with the campaign and we hope to continue the innovation in 2012.

So you will be returning with the campaign next year?

We are so pleased with the success of the campaign we are now seriously considering launching a second season. It will also be based on what the fans are asking for, if you go on the page you can see hundreds of fans giving suggestions and recommendations, so it is working as it should be working, driving the engagement with the consumers – and it is a very encouraging sign to follow it up in 2012.

So it will be six new girls?

We are not quite ready with the concept yet. We will review and start to look at how we can make the concept evolve and improve it again. Our fans are very demanding, rightly so, we like a challenge so if we do continue we will definitely make it bigger and better. We already have some ideas, so it should be really fun – and watch out for 2012!