Around ten years ago, BT Sport took a chance on something unusual in the world of advertising: posters inside grassroots football and cricket club changing rooms.
We had fewer than 100 clubs, only two sports, and a single format: A3 posters.
But they saw what we were trying to build, and they backed it:
To understand the impact their campaign was having, we ran a recall study across our early player panel. The results were strong, extraordinarily strong, but when you think about it, not that surprising as no one had done this before, no one had ever put adverts inside loads of grassroots sports club changing rooms:
- 65% unprompted recall
- 44% increased positivity towards the brand
- 51% likely to seek further information
- 0% negative reaction
It proved that when you put the right message in the right place, it doesn’t just get seen: it sticks.
And that little study turned into something much bigger.
A Decade Later: The Network Looks Very Different
So much has changed since that first BT Sport campaign that it’s almost unrecognisable:
- Then: ~100 clubs
Now: 350+ clubs across England, Wales and Scotland - Then: Football and cricket
Now: Football, cricket, bowls, rugby and more to come - Then: Posters in changing rooms
Now: Posters + clubhouses + communal spaces + bar areas - Then: Posters only
Now: Over 120 digital screens, making us the largest dedicated grassroots OOH + DOOH network in the UK - Then: ~35,000 weekly footfall
Now: 250,000+ weekly footfall - Then: One bloke with a brown beard
Now: The same bloke, but with a grey-silver-brown thing going on
(but still doing the driving, the posting, the mapping and the chasing)
Grassroot Media doesn’t look like a startup anymore.
It something that works, and is sustainable, and as proof, check out our case studies:
Full Circle: TNT Sports Back on Our Screens
Last month, BT Sport’s new incarnation TNT Sports returned to grassroots with its FA Cup First Round campaign, live across our football screens nationwide.
A decade after the original test study, they’re still putting their message right in front of real players, real fans and real communities — and the network they’re using has grown more than seven-fold.
Why This Matters
Grassroots sport hasn’t changed: the passion, the community, the sense of belonging are still the same.
But we have changed.
We’ve grown, scaled, matured and built something that no one else in the UK has: A true grassroots advertising network that directly funds the clubs it appears in.
From BT Sport to TNT Sports, the story is the same:
Brands that show up for grassroots earn attention, respect and loyalty.
And we’re proud to have helped make that happen, then and now.