A white football appears on the screens of London’s Piccadilly Circus, while a robotic arm applies the symbols of different football competitions to it one by one. With each new mark, the ball grows until it bursts into red and blue confetti, leaving behind the number that best explains the scale of the new Sky Sports season: more than 1,500 live matches.
The 3D activation is one of the central elements of the new Welcome to the Show campaign, through which Sky Creative brings together the Premier League, Women’s Super League, EFL and Scottish Premiership into a single football offering. Rather than communicating each competition separately, the idea positions the entire season as one big show in which different leagues, clubs and their audiences meet under the same platform. Sky describes it as its biggest football campaign to date.
However, the large number of matches has not been turned solely into an argument about the volume of content. At the same time, the campaign seeks to preserve what makes fans rarely experience football as a generic sports product: the connection with their own club. The national outdoor campaign is therefore accompanied by dedicated creative executions for every Premier League club, while the messages are also incorporated into football pitch graphics. Digital and social channels are also using tailored content during the opening weeks of the season.
The television element of the campaign runs for 30 seconds and does not attempt to present the new season through a sequence of the biggest stars or spectacular moves. It starts from recognisable situations from fans’ lives and the return of rituals that begin again once the ball starts rolling. In this way, Welcome to the Show communicates both the scale of Sky’s offering and the experience of an audience for whom a single match can matter more than the overall figure of 1,500 broadcasts.
The campaign is running across television, cinema, BVOD platforms, social media, digital channels and outdoor. The Piccadilly Circus activation, launched on 17 August, ends with hundreds of recognisable Sky Sports microphone covers falling across the screen after the ball explodes. A dedicated football mural in Shoreditch is set to further showcase the breadth of the live schedule, with Sky tentatively announcing its installation for 26 August.
For the development of the Piccadilly Circus execution, Sky Creative used artificial intelligence-based tools during the concepting and visualisation stages. Their role was to enable faster testing and prototyping of different ideas before final production, particularly given the complexity of the 3D execution created for one of London’s most recognisable digital screens.
Welcome to the Show began rolling out in early August, first via Sky AdSmart and BVOD, followed by the launch of national and localised outdoor on 10 August. Rather than using a single message aimed at all football fans, Sky Sports builds the new season between two extremes: a number large enough to demonstrate the scale of the offering and details local enough for fans to recognise their own club within the same campaign.
