Research proves that football makes girls stronger and more confident. Yet, due to the stigma attached to girls’ football, many girls stop playing at the age that they need confidence the most. So UEFA challenged us to help girls overcome that stigma, and grow the game.

In response, we created Together #WePlayStrong, a fully-integrated, socially-led campaign that would inspire teenage girls across Europe to either keep playing football or give the sport a go, fuelled by girls convincing each other to come play.  We created a range of assets, held together through a mix of illustration/animation and real footage/photography, that give girls their own visual language for football and show how inclusive, fun, and kick-ass girls' football can be.

The campaign is socially-led, with TV and print support, and launched in 2017. From GIFs on Giphy, to content films that live on social media, to an iMessenger sticker pack, the campaign was optimised to be wherever teens want to be, living across 600+ platforms. And in the first three months, we had over 35 million campaign views, gained 25k followers from scratch, and had over 1.02 billion impressions, all without traditional above the line media spend. 

This project is:
Client-commissioned

Agency
FCB Inferno

Client URL
https://www.weplaystrong.com/

My Role in This Project
I worked with FCB Inferno’s former Group Creative Director Elspeth Lynn to develop UEFA’s campaign for teenage girls from scratch, designed to work across 55 countries and on over 600 social platforms. Together #WePlayStrong was built on how girls communicate, in person and online, and needed to show teenage girls across Europe that football kicks ass (while giving them ways to share the love with their peers).

In the span of a few months, we built a brand designed to be rolled out across multiple languages, interfaces, and regions. I wrote and created a hero film and television spot, which aired across 55 countries and during UEFA competition half-time in stadiums across Europe. I also wrote and developed an additional 20 supporting content films with FCB Inferno’s in-house production team. I oversaw the production of 1000+ still assets to be used in posters, social posts, and press ads. And we developed a series of icons, illustrations, and GIFs for Giphy (which had 109.8 million views within a few months of campaign launch, and now have upwards of 3 billion). The goal was to be everywhere that teenage girls were - and boy, did we deliver.

This massive campaign was developed by a nimble team behind the scenes, requiring me to do a lot of things sitting outside traditional copywriting responsibilities. But because I was used to learning on the job, I just rolled with it. I leveraged my perspective as a young woman and my interest in tech to ensure that campaign would be a hit with teens everywhere, and that it felt genuinely inclusive from a casting perspective, too (after all, we wanted all girls to feel welcome to come play). Together #WePlayStrong was a success and is still going today, inspiring girls across Europe to come play.