Executive summary
KNVB, the national football association of the Netherlands, needed a scalable way to help nearly 800 local clubs run recruitment campaigns while maintaining a consistent national brand. Most clubs lacked the expertise and resources to create effective marketing materials, making manual localization inefficient and inconsistent. By implementing Cape.io’s creative automation, KNVB built a centralized platform where clubs can access pre-approved templates and easily customize key elements such as local details. With built-in input controls and guided onboarding, even non-expert users can launch campaigns that stay fully on-brand. This approach allows KNVB to turn one central campaign concept into hundreds of localized variations, increasing participation, simplifying workflows, and improving engagement with young players and their parents.
KNVB
success story
Challenge
Scaling a national marketing campaign across hundreds of local organizations is rarely just a question of reach - it’s a question of control, consistency, and usability.
For the KNVB, activating nearly 800 football clubs across the Netherlands meant finding a way to balance a strong, unified brand identity with the need for local relevance.
To empower local marketing teams, ensuring campaign consistency while accommodating local nuances is vital. The KNVB, with nearly 800 clubs nationwide, faced the challenge of maintaining brand identity while allowing clubs to personalize campaigns. Many clubs lacked the expertise or resources to create effective campaigns independently, making manual recreation of central concepts inefficient and often ineffective. KNVB needed a strategy that blended national vision with local relevance.
Solution
With Cape Creative Automation, KNVB created an online environment that all participating clubs can access.
Each club has its own sub user account with the according templates for their creatives that always align with the brand identity. The input validation functionality ensures that the local marketing teams can only change those elements of the campaign that are essential for the local touch. With the invitation for the environment comes an instruction video to ensure everyone can start without too much effort.
Results
KNVB now connects hundreds of football clubs across the Netherlands to pre-set campaign templates.
What starts as a single campaign concept can now result in 800 different campaigns. Campaign managers no longer have to localize hundreds of campaigns, or send countless emails back and forth - just one interface to rule them all. With Cape Creative Automation, KNVB has got the best of both worlds: the creation of central campaign concepts and the personalization by local clubs. Localization creates high relevance for the target audience, which results in better engagement!
Industry
Athletics & recreation
Headquarters
Zeist, Netherlands
Company Size
Enterprise
Teams involved
In-house brand teams
Our goal was to connect as many clubs as possible to our campaign. Our experience is that clubs have to be made it as simple as possible. When they don’t have to think about the campaign for their club, the chance is bigger that they will participate. With Cape we created this low entry for clubs to run a local campaign to new parents and children, throughout our central style 'Playing like Orange’.
Maarten de Backer
Project Lead
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