‘Theatre of Dreams’ Gets EA SPORTS Exclusive

This is a more interesting announcement than might first appear at first glance so pray read on…

The ‘Theatre of Dreams’ (aka Manchester United’s Football / Soccer Stadium Old Trafford) is, courtesy of Matchday Media’s 200 x MDM.TV in-stadia Screens ^[1] getting an exclusive repeat peak of an Electronic Arts TV commercial only previously shown on SKY TV – in fact it was only ever first shown during the half time interval of last week’s Chelsea v Manchester United game.

The commercial itself stands out as something of a 4 minute masterpiece and won rave reviews amongst armchair football fans (for you could not have seen it if you were at the game!!!) and has been much talked about.

The advert basically features Wayne Rooney as a Manchester United fan (he is in fact a regular first team Manchester United and England star) playing EA SPORTS FIFA 09 game by controlling ‘himself’ playing for Manchester United against Real Madrid!

It’s all rather clever and looks great and to any die-hard Manchester United fan something that they would not wish to miss.

So here we see Mediacom being rather clever on EA SPORTS behalf and getting the advert repeated in the ‘Theatre of Dreams’ to over 150,000 fans during the next two Premier League fixtures at the Old Trafford stadium.

Simon Broderick of Mediacom told us “We seized the opportunity to place this great piece of content at the heart of the fans experience and given its unique resonance with Manchester United fans chose to run the extended version at half time during live games”

He added “EA SPORTS FIFA 09 needs to be close to the beautiful game and the MDM.TV network allows us to talk to football’s most passionate and active fans – hence our use of their complete stadium network for our standard FIFA 09 creative”

Our industry needs to help the Media Planners come up with many other clever uses of TV material as possible, so hats off to all those involved in pioneering this.