Inspiring Wellness Through Sponsorship: AIA & Tottenham Hotspur

There are not many instances in football where a big partnership also serves as a way for a brand and the club to convey a clear message to fans and communities. Tottenham Hotspur's long-standing partnership with Asian life insurance company AIA is an example of that. Being the "Global Principal Partner" of Tottenham Hotspur, AIA's key messages on promoting a healthy, active lifestyle demonstrate that football sponsorships can be more than just making a brand's name visible to more people or fans.

Running through the post-lockdown restart of the 2019-20 Premier League season, Spurs primary partner AIA pivoted its fan engagement activities to a 360° virtual stadium experience.

In 2019, AIA, the largest health and life insurance provider in Asia, extended its global principal partnership with Tottenham Hotspur until 2027, to continue to use the tie-up to promote more active, better, healthier, and longer lives to fans, customers, and potential customers.

The deal saw AIA continue to appear on the front of the club’s Men’s, Women’s, and Academy team shirts in all competitions and extend the Asia-focused community coaching program (which had seen more than 40,000 children and young people participate in to date), as well as introduce new activations based around developing skills and improving physical fitness across AIA’s main 18 markets in the Asia-Pacific region. As the 2019-20 season restarted during the pandemic, with no fans in stadiums, AIA briefed agency CSM to find a new way to connect with Tottenham Hotspur supporters and provide them with a unique, brand-linked experience.

In collaboration with Spurs and AIA marketers, the team at CSM launched ‘The AIA Coaching Corner’: an exclusive, interactive 360° experience of the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which provided an ‘inner sanctum experience’ for fans.

Integrated with exclusive AIA and Tottenham Hotspur content, the initiative included player videos, coaching team training tips, health and diet tips from players and chefs, nutritional and wellness tips from AIA global brand ambassador David Beckham, and a look inside areas supporters don’t get to see on matchday (including the dressing rooms, the tunnel, the dugout, and the AIA box).

The 360° controllable experience, created with Holoscribe, was primarily hubbed on a new site. Some individual content pieces from the evolving activation were also amplified across the club and the brand’s social media channels.

Thus far, the virtual experience has generated more than 42,000 virtual stadium visits, with fans/visitors spending more than seven minutes per visit browsing and viewing the content.