All tickets sold In 24 hours
Of going on sale
Tickets sold out in 24 hours
The Army v Navy match is the annual rugby union match between the teams of the Army and the Royal Navy, it marks the conclusion of the inter-services rugby season and takes place at Twickenham Stadium, attracting a crowd of 82,000. Our client has provided event marketing services for the event since 2014 up until the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, ticket sales for the event rocketed, with the first year under their management being the first 'sell-out'.
Working in collaboration with our client, we have supported the creation of event marketing strategy and implementation.
Of going on sale
In a six-hour window on ticket sale day
With the site staying online during peak demand
Ticket sales for the Army v Navy match had been strong since our client took over event marketing in 2014, but the website itself was holding the event back. They needed a new site that would increase engagement, help drive the event towards a full sell-out, and be genuinely easier for their team to administer day to day.
They also wanted a stronger presence on social media, which meant the new website needed to integrate cleanly with social platforms rather than sit apart from them. The design had to lift usability and engagement while still complementing the various brands that partner with the event.
We suggested going further than a like-for-like rebuild, giving the client more design flexibility through additional CMS controls, so they could vary layout page by page while staying within the agreed branding. Alongside that, the site needed to be mobile-first, rich in video and photography, heavily optimised for search, built to promote ticket sales, and able to handle a significant spike in traffic in the run-up to match day.
The turnaround was tight. We had just eight weeks from instruction to the ticket sale date. The existing site had built up strong search rankings over time, so a large part of the work involved protecting that performance through the migration, and much of the old content didn't map cleanly onto the new sitemap, meaning it needed adapting rather than simply carrying across.
We were brought onto this project on the strength of a long working relationship with the client across several previous marketing projects. That existing trust let us move quickly once the brief was confirmed.
We designed a new site with far more flexibility and control over content, page by page, and rebuilt the site on Serenity Source, our content management system, giving the client simpler day-to-day administration alongside the performance benefits of a newer platform. On-load animations were added to guide visitors down the page, and integration with X and Instagram feeds made it easy for the client to share content across social channels without extra manual work.
We linked the site directly to the external Army and Navy ticket sale platforms, which played a direct part in the event selling out within 24 hours. To protect the search ranking the previous site had built up, we set up more than 300 redirects during migration. The build also included a manageable countdown feature for the event date and ticket sale, and integration with the client's email marketing platform to capture recipients for future campaigns.
The new website was a clear success. It achieved a 100% speed score on desktop and a 70% score on mobile, a strong result given the volume of video and photography the client wanted to include, and it stayed online without issue throughout the busiest period of ticket sales. All available tickets sold out in 24 hours, the site retained and improved on its previous search engine ranking, and it handled 14,000 measured site loads within a six-hour window on ticket sale day alone.
This project shows what a long-standing relationship and a tight brief can achieve under real time pressure. In eight weeks, the new site supported a sold-out event, without losing the search visibility the client had spent years building. The sell-out itself speaks to the growth side of the job, but the value hasn't stopped there. The client's team can now manage content with far more confidence and far less effort than before, and the platform itself has become a genuine asset, one that's kept earning its place every ticket sale day since.
If you've got an event or campaign with a hard deadline and a website that isn't pulling its weight, we'd be glad to talk it through.
If you're keen to learn more about this case study or have similar challenges, don't hesitate to reach out.
