Sport & Entertainment
128,000 Sessions in 3 Days for Borussia Mönchengladbach
Borussia Mönchengladbach launched a cross-media fan campaign with the UpReach Virtual Booth — the browser-based photo booth with no physical hardware on site. In three days, the activation generated 128,000 sessions and over 500,000 impressions, at an average interaction time of 62 seconds per fan. Every image created also flowed into an aggregated fan mosaic — visual proof of the size of the community, multiplied across the club's channels.
More than 200 B2B brands from across Europe trust UpReach — from agencies to enterprise corporations.
The initial situation
Bundesliga clubs have a reach asymmetry: stadium capacity is 54,000 seats per match, but the fan community spans several hundred thousand people — many of whom can never make it to the stadium. An activation that only works on match day excludes a large part of the community.
For the Borussia campaign, the requirement was clear: the activation had to scale — anywhere, any time, with no hardware logistics and no geo-limit. A classic hardware touchpoint in the stadium or fan shop would not have reached the bulk of the fan base.
At the same time, the experience was not to fragment into separate, isolated sessions. The brand message "we are one community" only works if the community becomes visible — as an aggregated image, not as 128,000 individual photos in 128,000 WhatsApp threads.
The UpReach solution
UpReach delivered a configured Virtual Booth — the browser-based UpReach solution. Fans opened the campaign URL on a smartphone or desktop, granted the browser access to the camera and ran the full workflow. No app installation, no device onboarding, no geo-restriction.
The AI layer placed the fan into prepared Borussia brand worlds: stadium atmosphere, the fan curve, crest backgrounds — depending on the activation slot. The fan stood in front of their smartphone camera, the AI cut them out and composited them into the brand world. Output: a shareable image for social media and WhatsApp.
The mosaic mechanism was the scaling lever. Every image created flowed into a central aggregation system that composed a large-format fan mosaic from thousands of fan sessions. The club account could share this mosaic across social media channels — visual proof of the size of the community, making each individual participant visible as part of a whole.
The campaign ran cross-media: club channels promoted the URL, fans shared their images on organically, and reach grew with every session.
More on the Virtual Booth: /produkte/virtual-booth.
Setup & Logistics
Four weeks' lead time: 2 weeks for the Virtual Booth configuration (custom UI in the Borussia branding, AI compositing layer onto the stadium and brand-world templates, mosaic aggregation back end), 1 week for club branding alignment and sign-off of the AI outputs by the marketing team, 1 week for load testing — a Bundesliga fan campaign has unpredictable load peaks, and the pipeline has to carry tens of thousands of parallel sessions.
No physical set-up required — the Virtual Booth ran fully browser-based on a campaign URL. No hardware logistics, no on-site technicians, no stand space.
Back-end monitoring ran through the cloud CMS: sessions, geo-distribution, interaction time and mosaic progress were visible live. The club marketing team could observe the activation in real time and trigger promotional social media posts in sync.
Results by the numbers
sessions
impressions
average interaction time
128,000 sessions in 3 days is a volume that would not be reachable with physical hardware logistics. Even ten hardware stations running in parallel would have had to capitulate under this load peak — the browser-based Virtual Booth scaled to the club's reach, with no hardware limit.
The average interaction time of 62 seconds is above average for a pure browser session. Standard web sessions on brand landing pages sit below 30 seconds. The AI photo mechanism kept fans active in the workflow — take a photo, choose a brand world, view the output, share.
The aggregated fan mosaic was the viral multiplier. Every fan saw themselves as a small image in a vast aggregation composition — a proof image of the size of the community, shared by the club account, which created an effect of identification beyond the 500,000 impressions: "I am part of this wall."
Key takeaways from this setup
The Virtual Booth is the scaling lever for mass activations: hardware setups are logistically limited. For fan activations with hundreds of thousands of participants, the browser-based pipeline is the only viable architecture. No device limit, no geo-limit, no set-up effort.
An aggregation mechanism beats isolated sessions: 128,000 individual photos with no aggregation are 128,000 posts with no brand consequence. The mosaic turns every individual session into a contribution to a shared image — the community becomes visible, and the brand message carries.
Interaction time is the KPI, not click rate: 62 seconds of engagement per fan is a qualitative signal. Browser-based brand activations are often measured only by session counts — dwell time is the better indicator of brand impact.
Cross-media promotion strengthens browser activations: the activation ran through club channels, social media promotion and organic fan shares in parallel. A virtual booth with no promotion architecture does not reach its potential — the browser touchpoint is the mechanism, multi-channel promotion is the fuel.
UpReach Components Used
Hardware
Virtual Booth (browser-based, no physical hardware)
Software 01
AI background removal + brand-world compositing (cloud GPU pipeline for browser sessions)
Software 02
custom UI in the Borussia branding, mosaic aggregation back end, cross-media URL distribution, cloud CMS for live monitoring
Mass fan activation via Virtual Booth for your sports brand
UpReach scales browser-based AI activations for Bundesliga clubs, associations and sports brands — with no hardware logistics, with an aggregation mechanism.
