The award-winning campaign that made millions switch to women’s football
Telecommunications company Orange had a straightforward ask for creative agency Marcel: promote the French team at the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup. It was a simple brief, but it required an inventive solution to address the way viewership of women’s football lagged men’s by a factor of four to one. Marcel realised that their commission wasn’t just to promote one national team at one competition, but to challenge the sexist bias that prevented equal viewership.
Their solution was to address the issue head-on. Using the tried and tested format of the highlights compilation, they created an edit of best bits from the women’s team. Then, they used VFX to switch genders and identities, turning Sakina Karchaoui into Antoine Griezmann, Delphine Cascarino into Kylian Mbappé, and Selma Bacha into Kingsley Coman. In the second half, the ruse was revealed.
The work won a coveted Black Pencil in the Tactical section of the Digital & Social category, as well as two Yellow Pencils, five Graphite and three Wood Pencils, in categories from VFX to Scripted Short-Form. The clip was covered widely in France and beyond, and at the time of writing had been viewed more than 200 million times. As the team at Marcel say: people love to be tricked. “Orange is an engineering company, so they ordered a very serious study to measure [the campaign’s] impact,” says Gaëtan du Peloux, Marcel's Chief Creative Officer. “Ninety-two percent of the people who watched this video said, ‘From now on I'm going to watch women's football.’ If you make the calculations, that's millions of people who are now open to appreciate a variety of football that they didn’t appreciate in the past.”
“If you make the calculations, that's millions of people who are now open to appreciate a variety of football that they didn’t appreciate in the past.”
All this success depended on a striking social strategy: after crafting the work meticulously, they debuted the clip with just one social influencer. Putting all their eggs in one basket, the team trusted that this would prove impactful enough to launch the campaign. Marcel Managing Director Léoda Esteve describes the importance of trusting the format to gain this virality, a strategy that made one influencer key: “One of the key learnings is that, sometimes, when you think about ideas as a creative agency you need to take a step back and not force your idea into a format or a media,” she says. “You have to let the format lead the idea and not the other way around.”
Of course, the wider upswing in interest in women’s football was also critical, as Du Peloux stresses: “An idea needs to meet its time. Sometimes you can have the best idea ever, but if it's too early, it's too early. If it's too late, it's too late. And for this idea, it was right on time.”