November 3, 2023
Since the introduction of the My Sports tab in Apple News, articles around this topic have been reaching the platform’s 145 million monthly active readers more easily. As a result, publishers and organisations are keen to deliver their content to Apple News to reach this audience. FlatPlan is excited to announce the latest sporting organisation to join: European football giants UEFA.
UEFA (or the Union of European Football Associations) is the governing body of European football and the umbrella organisation for 55 national associations. They work to promote football in a spirit of unity, solidarity, peace, understanding and fair play. The result of this work is six key tournaments that UEFA organises.
They are the Champions League, the Women’s Champions League, the Europa League, the Europa Conference League, the Nations League and the European Football Championship.
So how will UEFA leverage audiences on Apple News to drive commercial success?
Due to Apple’s philosophy of only distributing high-quality journalism, Apple News readers are highly engaged. By distributing their website content to Apple News, UEFA is reaching an audience who are absorbed in the content when using the app, and therefore more likely to convert, too. This is augmented by Apple’s unique way of surfacing personalised content to readers which provides access to an audience that can’t be found elsewhere.
As a result, Apple News represents an opportunity to make people aware of platforms such as the Champions League app or the EURO app where readers can get exclusive access to UEFA content during the tournaments.
The UEFA Champions League Fantasy Football is also important to the organisation. It already has a strong following and the growth of the game can be boosted further by promoting it within their Apple News articles. This is one of UEFA’s key commercial drivers for delivering to Apple News. Their access to the sport and resulting content serves as a great introduction to their Football Fantasy league.
This largely follows the same pattern that many publishers pursue on Apple News: start delivering content to Apple News to reach 145 million readers; nurture them into loyal followers with FlatPlan reader retention tools; then drive first-party data capture by funnelling them to own properties, be that app downloads, website registrations or newsletter signups.
All of this must be coupled with strong branding that reflects UEFA’s prestige in the footballing world. To represent this, FlatPlan produced something a little different for UEFA’s Apple News channel.
As with all Apple News channels, the most important place to start is branding. This helps readers familiarise themselves with a new publication when they see it alongside all the other major publishers on the app.
But things were a little different for UEFA’s channel. All six of their leagues or tournaments carry their own distinct branding. So the FlatPlan design team decided to create six separate channels for UEFA’s Apple News integration and ensured all six channels perfectly matched the branding seen on the UEFA website. This meant they were clearly signposted so that readers could quickly and easily tell which tournament they were reading about. Here’s the result.
Each tournament article carries custom fonts, footers, background images and logos. Text, buttons and boxed content widgets also have their own branded colourways. This reflects how UEFA shows the visual distinction between the tournaments within branding and therefore provides a seamless experience when readers go from Apple News to the website.
FlatPlan also equipped UEFA’s Apple News channel with inline Follow CTAs to encourage reader retention, other inline CTAs to drive commercial goals and a branded footer that drives downloads of their apps.
These essential elements enable UEFA to get the most out of their Apple News channel and funnel traffic towards first-party data capture strategies. With all of these elements in place, FlatPlan ensures UEFA can engage with readers throughout their journey. Right from the start, they get a fully optimised channel that maximises reach, includes tools to nurture new readers and then drives loyal readers to UEFA’s owned properties.
All of these optimisations work towards the goal of driving traffic and interest towards UEFA’s commercial goal – their apps and fantasy football league where they can engage more directly with their newly engaged readers.
If this sounds like something your media organisation would like to utilise, chat with our expert team to find out how we can help you achieve growth using Apple News.
No matter what stage you're at in your discovery of Apple News, we'll help you get the information you need to make the right decision for your media business.
