Yahoo! UK debuts Premier League footy highlights

After securing the Premier League football online highlights rights away from Virgin Media, Yahoo! UK has debuted its “snack-sized” packages of the weekend’s games.

As well as being displayed prominently on the Yahoo! homepage, the portal’s sport section has been taken over by football highlights with the season kicking off on Saturday, as well as its advertisers, which include Adidas, Heineken, BT and Sony Pictures.

Yahoo! is talking up its acquisition of Premier League highlights, which runs from seasons 2010-13, as giving it “one of the largest high-quality video inventories in the UK” but to really make the rights pay it will also need to attain mind share amongst UK football fans as the place to catch up on all the action, which Virgin Media failed to do.

To address this, Yahoo! is to support the coverage with a year-long marketing campaign – ‘Make Yahoo! your home for football ‘ – which it used during the World Cup and with David Beckham. It will run across radio and digital, with a partnership on XFM supported by a digital campaign that mixes search engine marketing, direct response and rich media executions on some of the UK’s largest football sites.