Darts Corner is the leading darts equipment retailer in the UK. With the PDC World Championship taking place in December and January, we wanted to create a digital PR campaign that would spark conversation in the darts world at this peak time, with the following clear objectives:
With the objective of creating a campaign that is shareable and a conversation starter, we thought we’d jump on the biggest discussion point of the tournament – who is going to win? However, we didn’t just want to create a standard, boring campaign that was instantly forgettable, we wanted the campaign to be different and to stand out.
To get started, the Digital PR team met for an ideation session, and after throwing around multiple ideas and discussing these with the client, we decided we wanted to create a video where we could predict the Darts World Champion. But we needed help – and that’s where Truffle came in.
For those of you not in the know, Truffle is one of the resident pigs of Ouseburn Farm, a local farm and charity based in the heart of Newcastle. We reached out to Ouseburn Farm to ask if we could use their facilities to film, and of course, kindly use their resident pig to predict the winner.
With the objective of creating multiple spins and angles for the campaign, we asked Truffle to predict the winner of the tournament, the runner-up, dark horses and players who Truffle predicted would have a deep run in the tournament.
Using Bonded’s Content and Create team, we filmed the predictions with Truffle and had our own Pippa Gilroy present in the video, to add personality to the content and give them that premium feel.
The collaboration with the Content and Create team allowed us to create short social media-friendly videos that both we and Darts Corner could share, with the aim of creating maximum noise and generating placements in national media.
Our approach to outreach was simple; we wanted this campaign to be placed in top national media, as well as getting in front of the publications that Darts Corner’s audience engages with to create as much noise as possible and increase Darts Corner’s brand presence.
The results
The campaign achieved wide-reaching results. We also saw a fantastic piece of coverage on TalkSPORT, the leading sports radio station. TalkSPORT dedicated a whole 5-minute segment on their weekend breakfast show, where they played the full prediction video with Darts Corner’s branding at the forefront. TalkSPORT has a weekly listening figure of 3.9 million people, and with this being Darts Corner’s primary audience, the results couldn’t have been better.
We secured multiple national and sport-focused media placements, seeing our campaign featured in publications such as The Sun and the Daily Star. With a total of 9 online placements, the publications that covered the story have a monthly reach of 98.2 million.
With the nature of the campaign, we saw a lot of success on social media. The Sun Sport’s Facebook (787,000 followers) & X (238,000) accounts published the campaign, as did The Newcastle Chronicle, who shared the video on their Facebook page of 615,000 followers.
I wanted to say thank you to the Bonded SEO team for the hard work they have put into the Darts Corner account. The results speak for themselves, and I have found Bonded to be one of the most supportive agencies I have ever worked with!
