Coventry City Football Club came to us with a clear commercial objective and a tight window to achieve it. The club was on its way to the Premier League; the Coventry Building Society Arena had a capacity of 22,000, and season ticket sales were sitting at approximately 19,000. That 3,000-seat gap represented £2 million in unrealised revenue — and the pre-season window was the only realistic opportunity to close it. Over six months, working alongside the club’s internal marketing team, we designed and delivered a targeted out-of-home advertising strategy that flooded the city and its surrounding areas with sky blue — and came within touching distance of a full house.
Coventry City had the momentum, the ambition, and the stadium. What they lacked was a marketing presence in the city and its surrounding catchment that matched the scale of the opportunity. When we conducted our initial audit, the picture was stark: outside of the billboard directly outside the ground and two further sites on major routes through Coventry, there was virtually no outdoor advertising presence for the club anywhere in the city or its wider region.
For a Championship club pushing for promotion, that absence was a significant missed opportunity. The fanbase for a club of Coventry City’s stature extends well beyond the city boundary — into towns and villages within a 20-mile radius where there is no local Championship club competing for allegiance. These were communities of potential season ticket holders who had not been reached, not because they were not interested, but because the club had not yet spoken to them.
The brief was to change that — and to do it fast enough to convert interest into season ticket sales before the pre-season window closed.
We began by working through the club’s existing season ticket sales data, mapping where current holders were coming from and — crucially — identifying the localities within a 20-mile radius where sales were underperforming relative to population and football affinity. The analysis revealed a clear pattern: communities in neighbouring areas with no local Championship club of their own represented the highest-potential swing audience. These were fans without a natural first-choice club at that level — exactly the audience most likely to commit to a Coventry City season ticket if the club put itself in front of them.
With the target localities identified, we developed a comprehensive out-of-home media strategy covering the full range of available formats — bus backs, bus shelters, static roadside billboards, and digital OOH screens — across the key routes, town centres, and residential areas within the target zones. The strategy was built around saturation within the priority localities: the goal was not a single touchpoint but a consistent, unavoidable sky blue presence that made Coventry City feel like the obvious choice.
We handled all media research, site selection, pricing negotiation, and booking across the campaign. Working with outdoor media owners across Coventry and the surrounding region, we secured placements across bus backs, bus shelters, and both static and digital OOH sites for the eight-week campaign period. The negotiation process focused on maximising coverage within the available budget — ensuring that the campaign reached the priority localities with the frequency needed to drive action, not just awareness.
The creative was built around the club’s sky blue identity — bold, simple, and unmissable. The campaign ran across all booked formats simultaneously, creating the sudden, city-wide sea of sky blue that was central to the strategy. The effect was deliberate: to make Coventry City feel omnipresent in the city and its surrounding areas and to create the social and cultural momentum that turns passive interest into a season ticket purchase.
After engaging with Make Me Roar, Coventry City Football Club has achieved:
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