Published on 1st Aug 2022
Lucozade Football Sweepstake Web App Product Design & Build
What started as a simple 1-liner idea from Lucozade Sport, turned into a European wide internal business activation for Suntory. A first of its kind!
Lucozade Sport Football Sweepstake, by Chris Watterston
Coming from a freelance full-stack design and development background, this particular ask made me feel warm inside. The guys from the Lucozade Sport brand team approached brand activation and myself from the @TED Team, for advise on how they could run an internal business football sweepstake for the then approaching Men’s Euro 2020.
The feeling of warmth came from excitement. This was an opportunity to let my inner entrepreneurial grab the idea by the horns; an excuse to get my passions for product management, digital design, and development into bed together.
I first launched the sweepstake web application in 2021 (Men’s Euro delayed due to COVID). It took 100+ hours to complete, spanning across design, setup, development, testing, and deployment. 8,609 lines of bespoke code & algorithms. 22 version releases– and 5 automation tasks collectively running 296 times each day, collecting and calculating data.
It became a true passion project for me, and an 2021 initiative that got everyone excited.
"After the success of the Euros 2020 sweepstake, Chris took on the challenge to make it even bigger and better for the Women’s Euros this year by opening it out to our total European business."
"As ever the usability and visuals were super slick and the branding and tone of voice was spot on for the sport brand. Chris worked really hard with our European comms team to get messaging out encouraging signup and engagement and the feedback has been brilliant"
Hannah Norbury - Marketing Director for Suntory GB&I
But it didn’t stop there. The Women’s Euro 2022 was fast approaching. There was yet another opportunity to make this bigger and better.
For the Women’s Euro 2022, I made the sweepstake feel more “native” for mobile users and grew from a single view (page) to multiple. I built in 4 multilingual language selections for our diverse European users, and also introduced Health and Wellbeing to the table for colleagues by giving extra points by integrating Strava and exercising.
Objective
This was to become a first of its kind for the business. Yeah the business had carried our fairly generic and regional sweepstakes in the past, but nothing at this scale or as interactive.
Lucozade Sport wanted us to provide a sweepstake platform which could be used internally for Suntory GB&I. The brand asked for us to bring excitement to employees during the Men’s Euro 2020 tournament.
The discussions with the brand team kicked-off mid February 2021, four months before kick-off on 11th June 2021. Within this time, we had to propose a solution for the sweepstake, and bring it to life. We'd need move fast!
My Role
I was literally the “Jack of all trades”. I took on the digital product management, production and data analysis. To put it simple, I was 110% responsible for the success of this football sweepstake product.
I really had to re-spark my freelance days of getting fully embedded into the tools– UX information architect (IA) to API data management. Web application design to creating scheduled CRON for PHP algorithms. Incredibly, I managed to design and built the whole sweepstake web application from the ground up in as little as 4 months, while still handling day-to-day bits for other brand projects.
But this happened twice, first in 2021, and again in 2022 for the Women’s Euro tournament. It was a true test that landed for me, and I enjoyed every second!
"The Sweepstake was executed across Europe internally, which is the first time something like this has happened, fully testament to the behaviours shown by Chris"
Gareth Folwell - Brand Manager for Lucozade Sport
StrategyUI & UX DesignerDesign System DesignerFront-End DevelopmentBack-End DevelopmentAgile Digital Product DesignAgile Digital Product Manager
Learnings
I learnt a lot from this 2 year running project. Launching an internal business football sweepstake was defiantly a first for me. It wasn’t the internal web app part, but more the subject of it being a football sweepstake.
I’ve never designed a football application, let alone developed with an integrated data stream from the @Sportmonks Football API. I had to understand and learn how the Football API was structured, how I could leverage each endpoint and method, and output manipulated and structured JSON files for front-end usage. All while I was designing, developing the testing the five HTML emails for launch, and their multilingual friends.
But that aside, and post launch, I’d reviewed the analytics data and reached out to a few randomly selected colleagues for their honest anonymous feedback. This was where the true value sat, with our users.
As with any application, there is helpful feedback, and there’s complete crap. But where there was value given, it really was helpful. Users were interested in keeping engagement consistent, they loved the Strava integration and drive to support their personal health and well-being. Even insightful comments on the design and usability of the dashboards and data.
Overall, it was defiantly a huge win for everyone. A hopeful win which I’ll continue to build and improve over the foreseeable future.
"Chris has done brilliant job with the Women's Euros Sweepstake. Taking the leanings from previous tournaments to drive the highest level of internal engagement for a major sporting event."
Gareth Folwell - Brand Manager for Lucozade Sport
Gallery
Partners
TED Team (Suntory GB&I In-house Creative Agency)
The TED Team are the in-house creative agency set within Suntory GB&I.
Working along side the Suntory brands located at their head office (literally holding hands), the team are able to use their skill set to develop and execute and achieve creative, impactful campaigns. A skill set spanning across strategists, designers, copywriters, producers, developers, social, and so much more. The team delivered a lot of the marketing campaigns you’ve seen on TV, OOH, online, bus sides, etc.
Over the years, the TED Team have been crucial in delivering campaigns, such as ITV Love Island, Missguided, Tomb Raider (Larazade) Xbox Halo, Hasbro Gaming– to name just a few!
Sportmonks API
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For more information about Sportmonks, visit sportmonks.com.