The Solution
Making The Most of Premiere Matchups
Every fan wants to be at the game of the year—and for many MLS fans, Inter Miami will now be circled on the calendar. The question is: How do you extend the excitement around Messi to drive further growth?
Anticipating incredibly high fan demand for the season-opener against Inter Miami, the LA Galaxy proposed a three-phase approach to ticketing. It began on December 21, 2023—a full three weeks before the team planned to release single-game tickets for the Messi game. On that day–following a one-day presale on December 20, in conjunction with the announcement of the season schedule—single-game tickets for the majority of matches were made available. But fans’ first opportunity to get access to the Galaxy-Miami match came in the form of a package deal: A series of three distinct “6 Game Packs,” each of which also included the annual July 4 El Trafico—the Galaxy-LAFC darby—at the Rose Bowl.
To maximize our campaign results in selling the 6-packs, we wanted to target mid-funnel and bottom-funnel audiences who would be most likely to invest in a higher-price-point purchase. These included LA Galaxy’s first-party audiences (such as website visitors, email lists, and past purchasers), as well as engaged social-media audiences (such as the team’s Facebook and Instagram followers) and MLS interest targeting.
But even the Galaxy couldn’t anticipate the success of the campaign: The six-pack campaign sold out after just six days, having spent just 20% of the anticipated budget. The campaign outperformed our 2023 ROAS by 4915.54%!
During the run, we tested multiple creative options: One featuring Messi facing off against the Galaxy’s superstar midfielder Riqui Puig; another featuring Puig, Messi, and LAFC’s Denis Bouanga; and a third that featured only Puig. We often find that creative assets highlighting high-profile matchups out-perform our default ads. In this case, we had multiple wins: For LA Galaxy’s core fans, even when the opponent was the greatest player in the world, the highest-performing ad was the one featuring only the Galaxy’s star player, Puig. The ad brought in a ROAS 17.08% stronger than our baseline. We saw nearly as high results with more broadly-targeted ads highlighting the rivalries. The takeaway: Your biggest fans don’t want to miss a world-class opponent, but their heart is always with the home team.
The 6-pack campaign just happened to coincide with the holiday shopping season, and so we also ran a concurrent gift-giving campaign with the tagline, “Give the Gift of Galaxy.” The holiday messaging was targeted at a similar audience — high-intent, bottom-funnel fans. But instead of driving only to the 6-packs, visitors were also served up single-game-ticket options for the non-Messi matches. This campaign also saw an incredibly high ROAS, with purchases of 6-packs driving up the average order value (AOV).
Fomo Is Your Friend
In sports marketing, fan engagement is an art that’s becoming more of a science. The key is simple: Developing direct, lasting relationships between teams and fans. But in practice, it takes years and constant innovation. In addition to reaching core fans, the Galaxy realized the Messi Moment is an opportunity to engage with thousands of potential net-new fans — and bring them into the team’s orbit not just this year but for seasons to come. So how do you engage the passionate yet transient interest of soccer fans who don’t yet know your brand?
Welcome to Phase Two of the Galaxy’s Messi Moment strategy: Lead generation. The Galaxy tasked us with driving email signups, which in turn granted fans access to an exclusive pre-sale opportunity to purchase tickets to the Miami game a full day ahead of the general public.
This is a great example of why breakthrough moments matter. The Messi Moment means there’s a new generation of global soccer fans who may be about to experience your team’s brand for the very first time. As we’ve learned from decades working with the pop music and concert industries, pre-sale incentives are a powerful driver to build your first-party relationships from top- and mid-funnel audiences. The key, in this case, was to bring the Galaxy incremental fans — and not cannibalize our efforts to sell tickets to established fans, including the ones who were already buying the 6-packs. So our lead-generation campaign excluded those core audiences, instead targeting Messi fans, broader audiences of soccer and Premiere League fans, and even fans of other in-market, non-soccer-related sports teams.
Our paid media efforts, which ran across Meta and Google, drove thousands of signups — nearly half of all presale signups the team received — and captured a 3.3x stronger cost per lead than campaign benchmarks.
The TikTok Revolution
Among the strategic innovations employed by the Galaxy during its engagement with the Messi Moment was an investment in TikTok—a channel that every team is currently trying to crack.
One key learning from our prior Galaxy campaigns on TikTok was that platform-specific content typically out-performs the highly-produced creative the team uses on Facebook and Instagram. We’d seen noticeable improvements when we stopped repurposing Meta ads and instead began incorporating more native-feeling content, and taking advantage of TikTok’s interactive add-ons such as countdown stickers. We’d found that boosting the Galaxy’s organic TikTok posts captured stronger user intent and led to more cost-efficient traffic compared to our more polished creative.
But it still pays to have differentiated creative, especially when the objective shifts from reach and engagement to direct sales. We tested several different approaches, including boosts of the Galaxy’s viral, schedule-release video, as well as highly-produced, performance-tested assets. In this case, the high-quality option scored higher.
But LA Galaxy’s organic TikTok videos proved valuable in another way: Thanks to a brand-new feature, we were able to re-target fans who’d viewed or engaged with the Galaxy’s content. This was a brand-new feature on the platform at the time, less than two weeks old — but thanks to our deep knowledge of the TikTok ecosystem and our longstanding partnership with the TikTok team, we were able to get the Galaxy up and running on the fly.
We returned to TikTok for the lead-generation campaign, folding in the platform’s Automatic Targeting—TikTok’s version of Facebook’s “Broad Audiences,” in which machine learning is used to dynamically target users most likely to complete the form, based on a variety of algorithmically-guided factors.
