BlondGorilla gets behind the Sydney Swans in lead up to the AFL Grand Final

Perth digital agency BlondGorilla is in the thick of the buzz for this weekend’s AFL Grand Final, working with the Sydney Swans on a ‘Guernsey Generator’ social media campaign throughout the finals series.

BlondGorilla created a dynamic image rendering service to change – ‘on the fly’ – the number on the Swans guernsey and apply a custom signature.

“Working with the Swans we wanted to ramp up support as the Sydney swans entered the finals,” said BlondGorilla’s Boyd Hauff. “We built a multi-platform experience that allowed people to show their support and receive customised messages from players.”

BlondGorilla built an app for the Sydney Swans official Facebook page where a supporter can enter their name and favourite footy number and have the Guernsey generated with a message and signature, which can be shared on their preferred media.

On Twitter, an automatic reply feed was created for the finals period with the twitter handle: @SydSwans_finals. The supporters that hashtag ‘goswans’ and link ‘@sydneyswans’ receive an automatic reply.

So far there have been 2,200 Guernsey tweets via the automatic reply feed.

Tanya Paolucci, Digital Content Producer of the Sydney Swans, said  “During the launch week of the campaign our retweets increased by almost 180 per cent and we attracted over a 50 per cent increase on impressions in the same week to the same time last calendar month. We have been extremely pleased with the engagement levels we’ve seen with the guernsey generator, and fingers crossed will see even more if the Swans get over the line this weekend.”

Leading into Saturday’s Grand Final, the Swans and rivals Hawthorn are already engaged in a fierce battle on social media.