The Background
After 16 years as title sponsor of League of Ireland, SSE Airtricity faced a familiar but significant challenge. In an increasingly crowded sports sponsorship landscape, with a surge of brands and messages competing for attention, visibility was important but no longer enough. Competitor investment in Irish sport continued to grow, while within the League itself, sponsorship saturation of other brands, made it harder for established partners like SSE to stand out or remain connected to fans in a meaningful way.
Awareness for SSE’s League Sponsorship remained largely static for 5 years. This lack of growth signalled the need for a shift in how SSE showed up for fans – not just in creative, but in clever media. SSE had recently relaunched their sponsorship platform in 2024 ‘Powered by People’, placing passion, community and belonging at its core. The challenge was to land the new platform in a way that felt meaningful, visible and emotionally resonant – giving fans a say in the game, a voice, involvement.
The objective was clear – deliver uplift in spontaneous awareness.
This campaign was shortlisted Best Use of TV Sponsorship at the 2026 TAMI Awards
The Challenge
Developing the strategy began with a clear understanding of how audiences engage with League of Ireland. Analysis showed that engagement with football continues to grow year-on-year across both men and women, increasing by over 3%. While in-stadium attendance and participation continue to be important, live TV remains the dominant form of engagement at scale, with fans primarily connecting to the League by watching matches live or consuming football-related content, be it before or after matches air.
Now OMD needed to really understand how best to use TV to not only to drive reach, but to connect deeper with this engaged fanbase.
They recognised the power of live TV as the most influential stage to promote the League with reach and impact for SSE. Live broadcast not only brings the League into homes across the country, it provides moments of debate, anticipation, pride. This made TV the natural fit for the SSE ‘Powered by People’ platform – to allow the brand to show up at the heart of fan conversation and interaction.
At its heart, ‘Powered by People is all about connection.
Our strategy was to use broadcast itself more creatively as a space not just to be seen, but to also invite fans to get more involved.
The strategy with SSE was shaped through early collaboration with Virgin Media Television. The ambition was to look beyond traditional TV sponsorship and spot airtime – both of which is of huge value in the right setting. Together, they identified an opportunity to integrate SSE into the fabric of the broadcast in a way that felt authentic to the game and that brought value to viewers.
OMD wanted to evolve the role of broadcast TV beyond one-way communication, and this led to the creation of Have Your Say – a live, interactive broadcast mechanic and a media first for League of Ireland. By embedding real-time polls directly into match coverage, fans were invited to participate in the broadcast as it happened.
What was also important to SSE was that it wasn’t just about a media sponsorship – this was about how they could integrate authentically into Virgin Media’s coverage of the games, so it felt like a true media partnership that was literally Powered by People.
The Strategy
To fully realise OMD’s ambition, Virgin Media Television evolved the beyond a broadcast partner – providing scale, flexibility and editorial collaboration needed to build a sponsorship model where broadcast delivered reach, and innovation delivered deeper fan participation:
- Live Broadcast Sponsorship: Live broadcast sponsorship provided scale, consistency and authority required to support innovation
- Participation / Have your Say: delivering the step-change in engagement that redefined how the 2025 partnership would show up for fans on live TV
Live Broadcast Sponsorship
Live broadcast sponsorship formed the foundation of the SSE Airtricity League of Ireland partnership with Virgin Media Television. Building on the 2024 TV partnership of 14 sponsored matches, the 2025 partnership ran from February to October 2025, spanning 32 live televised matches across Virgin Media TV and player. This increased scale created the platform required to support innovation and sustain impact across the season.
Each match was framed with 10” opening and closing sponsorship stings, supported by 5” commercial break stings to reinforce brand presence and their proud sponsorship across the full broadcast experience. Additional stings featured across Virgin Media Play live streams and catch-up content, extending reach beyond linear viewing. Activity was amplified across Virgin’s social platforms, while a dedicated League of Ireland branded rail on Virgin Media Play housed all League content, making live and catch-up viewing easily accessible in one branded place.
This consistent, cross-platform presence anchored SSE Airtricity firmly within the League’s most emotionally engaging moments, ensuring the brand showed up with authority and credibility. In 2025, broadcast sponsorship was not the end goal, but the foundation on which innovation could be built – creating the scale, trust and attention needed to enable a more participatory fan experience.
Participation
Have Your Say was the defining innovation of the 2025 SSE Airtricity League of Ireland partnership with Virgin Media Television and represented a step-change in how sponsorship showed up on live TV. Designed as a media first for League of Ireland on the station, it transformed broadcast from a one-way viewing experience into a participatory platform that actively involved fans at home – bringing Powered by People to life in the most literal sense.
This idea could only really exist within live TV. The immediacy, scale and shared viewing moment of live broadcast were essential to the mechanic – no other medium could deliver the same real-time participation, collective energy or impact. Running across the full season, Have Your Say introduced a live, two-way engagement tool, embedded directly within studio match coverage. For each televised game, studio presenters posed a question aligned to the game, including predictions, opinions and season-defining debates. Questions appeared on screen as branded pop-up banners at least once per match, with flexibility to run during pre-match, mid-match analysis or post-match discussion. The banner included the SSE logo and QR code, prompting viewers to scan and vote, linking to a webpage where SSE branding appeared as pop-up during voting for 10-30 seconds.
Interactivity was flighted across the season to mirror natural conversation around the League: early fixtures focused on predictions and season outlooks, harnessing launch excitement; mid-season questions reflected form, momentum and emerging scores and player headlines to sustain engagement week-on-week. As the League reached its closing stages, questions shifted to outcomes, pressure moments and final predictions to build renewed momentum as fan interest peaked. This ensured participation remained relevant, fresh and engaging throughout the season.
By integrating Have Your Say within studio-led conversation, participation felt organic and additive to the viewing experience rather than interruptive. Fans were not taken away from the action; instead, their opinions became part of the broadcast narrative itself.
Broadcast created the stage, while Have Your Say changed how the brand further connected with fans.
The Results
This 2025 partnership with Virgin Media Television started out as a solution to deliver on brand awareness and support SSE’s new platform ‘Powered by People’, but became so much more.
The 2025 partnership delivered SSE Airtricity’s most meaningful sponsorship result in recent years: year-on-year growth in spontaneous brand awareness, following five years where awareness had remained largely static. For a mature sponsorship entering its sixteenth year, this represented a significant movement — proof that rethinking how the brand showed up through live television could still shift customer perception in a measurable way.
This growth was achieved by combining scale and innovation within an integrated Virgin Media Television partnership. Expanding from 14 live televised matches in 2024 to 32 matches in 2025 significantly increased SSE Airtricity’s broadcast presence, ensuring the brand appeared consistently across the full League season. Sponsorship stings remained critical within this: they delivered authority, visibility and repeated association with the League’s most emotionally engaging moments, anchoring SSE Airtricity firmly within the live viewing experience and reinforcing the brand’s leadership within the League of Ireland.
Alongside this increased broadcast weighting, Have Your Say transformed that visibility further into participation. By reimagining live broadcast as an interactive platform, the mechanic consistently converted viewers into participants throughout the season. Live polling and competitions embedded within match coverage generated several hundred fan engagements per game, delivering 5,000+ interactions across the season and moving sponsorship from passive exposure into active involvement.
The flighting of interaction was equally important to performance. Engagement was strongest during early fixtures, where predictions and opening season conversations naturally drove participation. As the season progressed, engagement remained steady and consistent, demonstrating that interaction sustained beyond launch novelty. Momentum then built again in the closing stages, as League outcomes intensified and fan interest peaked, helping maintain relevance across the full season rather than in isolated moments.
The expanded partnership in 2025 also reached 1.3 million viewers through broadcast stings, with significantly more branded broadcast moments year-on-year than in 2024. Crucially, this success came through close collaboration with Virgin Media Television — not simply as a media owner, but as an editorial partner willing to evolve how sponsorship could work within live sport coverage.
Together, broadcast scale and participation created something genuinely new for League coverage: a sponsorship that retained the authority of TV, while introducing interaction in a way only live TV could deliver. The result was not just stronger engagement, but a genuine refresh in how SSE Airtricity lived in customers’ minds — delivering growth in a category where movement can be difficult to achieve and proving that even long-established sponsorships can still innovate and grow!
Business Results against KPI set:
- Growth year on year in spontaneous brand awareness
Media Results against KPI set:
- 5,000+ interactions across the season through interactive polls/competitions
- Reached 3m viewers via broadcast stings
- + 129% increase in live sponsored matches year-on-year in 2025 for more branded broadcast moments and fan involvement
“Our partnership with the League of Ireland has been long standing and deeply rooted in belief, however we reached a point where awareness had begun to plateau. At the same time, the sports sponsorship landscape was becoming increasingly crowded, with new brands entering the space, competing for attention. We knew we needed to turn the dial on awareness – not just by being present, but by creating genuine cut through and a stronger emotional connection with audiences. Television was central to that shift. The broadcast sponsorship of LOI coverage on Virgin Media gave us scale and prominence. It allowed us to reach beyond existing fans and reconnect with wider audiences in a way other media channels couldn’t.
Rather than simply showing up around the coverage, we leveraged the innovative digital engagement feature, ‘Have Your Say’, allowing us to give fans a voice and sense of involvement – turning viewers into participants. Launched alongside our new #PoweredbyPeople sponsorship platform, it was a clear opportunity to put fan voice front and centre – demonstrating what the platform truly stood for by putting people at the heart of the broadcast. The year-on‑year uplift in spontaneous awareness reinforced the role TV played in reigniting brand momentum.”
Ashley Keating – SSE Airtricity Sponsorship Manager
Credits
Brand:
SSE Airtricity
Media Agency:
OMD
Supporting agencies/teams:
Virgin Media Television
Award:
TAMI Awards Shortlist for Best Use of TV Sponsorship at the 2026 TAMI Awards