To leverage a World Cup 2018 play-off away game against New Zealand, Peru national team sponsor Cristal reaffirmed its commitment to the side and brought its ‘Better Together’ brand promise to life by surreptitiously hacking the opposition team’s shirt so that the stadium in Wellington was filled with support for Peru despite only 64 Peruvians living in the city.
Territory: Peru/New Zealand
Agency: Houdini
Objectives
After finishing fifth in CONMEBOL qualifying tournament, the Peruvian national team faced an intercontinental final play-off against New Zealand in Wellington for a chance to play in the World Cup for the first time in 36 years and the team’s beer sponsor Cristal saw this has an opportunity to leverage spiking interest around the side, to reaffirm its commitment to the team and to its ‘Better together’ brand promise.
So Cristal challenged its agency Houdini to come up with a way to make the team feel at home despite playing 10,588km away in Wellington – a city where only 64 Peruvians live and where 36,000 New Zealander fans would cheer for their own team.
Activation
The ‘The Hacking Jersey’ response to this challenge emerged after Cthe brand and agency marketing team noticed that the New Zealand football shirt was mainly white with a secondary colour red incorporated into the design – similar to Peru’s own home kit.
Further research into similarities that could be leveraged found that the New Zealand team’s motto was ‘Here as One’ and the shape formed by the country’s geographical map mirrored the diagonal stripe across Peru’s own jersey.
So Cristal decided to use these similarities to surreptitiously ‘hack’ the New Zealand jersey in order to inspire Peru to the World Cup by using these colour/design details to create a jersey that all New Zealand fans would want to wear during the match – a white jersey with a red map of New Zealand across the chest which from a distance appeared very similar to the Peru team jersey.
The team then set out to ‘hack’ 5,000 New Zealand fans outside the stadium and get them to wear the new jersey in the stadium: these fans thought they were wearing a shirt supporting the home team, but from a distance it looked they were wearing the Peru kit and thus the Peru players would feel more at home when they took to the potch and saw so many of their own shirts being worn in the crowd.
The idea was that this apparent show of support would encourage them and spur them on to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1982.
The ‘hacked shirt’ was promoted and amplified through geo-targeted advertising and Cristal also worked with a former New Zealand international football player to amplify the message before an on-site street team gave away 5000 jerseys outside the stadium on match day.
Outcome
The campaign’s total reach was 5m, with 430,000 video views and a further 19,404 social engagements.
Plus, Peru won the play-off game 2-0 on aggregate and became the last team to qualify for Russia.
