‘The Match Against Bullying’, an activation which took place between March 2018 and October 2019, was a community and cause sponsorship initiative by Swedish FA and national stadium sponsor Swedbank working in tandem with the Friends Foundation charity on an integrated anti-bullying initiative in Sweden based around a World Cup warm up match and led by in-stadium life-sized sculptures.
Territory: Sweden
Agency: Weber Shandwick, Scream MediaByra, Social Club, The Line
Objectives
Bullying is a major social problem in Sweden and an obstacle to young people’s growth and future and research found it will cost Swedish society €1.6bn over the next 30 years.
Indeed, a recent survey revealed that while 65% of Swedish adults have experienced bullying in their childhood, the majority are still passive spectators and that almost every other Swede regrets that they haven’t done more to prevent bullying.
Swedbank, Sweden’s biggest bank, has long sought to combat the problem and this initiative saw it tie together three of its major sponsorships to shine a spotlight on the 60,000 children who suffer from bullying every year.
Swedbank, which has been a partner and sponsor of Swedish Football Association (SvFF) since the 1980s, has a deal which includes stadium naming rights which it handed over the its anti-bullying charity partner the Friends Foundation in 2012 with the intention of using it to support in-school anti-bullying programmes.
The idea behind this was for the arena to become a physical manifestation against bullying.
But a few years in, the stadium name had grown overly familiar to most Swedes who were stopping linking it to the Friends charity. According to a Kantar survey only 4 out of 10 visitors of Friends Arena knew why it is named as it is.
The team knew that something fresh and new was needed to remind the nation that the Friends Arena is meant to act as a physical manifestation against bullying.
The specific objective was to increase public and spectator knowledge about the Friends Foundation, its anti-bullying mission and Swedbank’s partnership.
While the general challenge was how to get more adults to not only understand that children that are bullied every day and it will affect them all their lives, but to also encourage them to stop being a spectator and start taking action.
The pre-campaign aims included:
> Increase knowledge about why the arena is named Friend Arena among visitors by 30%
> Increase the will of donating money to the Friends Foundation among the visitors by at least 30%
> Increase traffic to Friends’ website by at least 30%
Activation
The central strategy of ‘The Match Against Bullying’ was to shine a spotlight on the 60,000 children who are bullied every year: a number who together would fill every single seat of Friends Arena.
The target audience was the entire Swedish general public, all of those who wished they had done more to prevent bullying, and the strategy was to make the most of where the nations’s gaze was currently focused – a FIFA World Cup warm up between Sweden and Chile which would see 60,000 fans in the stadium and will reach 10% of the entire population through the live TV broadcast.
The initiative spanned a live flagship match event, PR, an outreach tour, sculptures, films, surveys, social content and a bespoke website at www.arenansbarn.se.
Leveraging its naming rights of the Friends Arena (Sweden’s national stadium) and partnership with the SvFF, the ground itself acted as the initiative’s core coms platform.
The aim was to ensure the national arena played a key in the fight against child and adolescent bullying and to make sure that the 1 million annual arena visitors all see these vulnerable children, understand how bullying affect their lives and engage them to take action to drive change.
The project was divided into a trio of main phases.
Phase One: Children of the Arena
In make the 60,000 children subjected to bullying each year in Sweden as visible as possible, 25 bronze sculptures of kids (on a scale of 1:1) called ‘The Children Of The Arena’ were installed in the stadium.
Bronze sculptures were chosen to drive home the idea of an everlasting engagement and the permanent sculptures were placed within the stadium is to highlight that bullying is the everyday life of many children.
Each individual sculpture had an associated sign and nearby wall inscription to encourage visitors to engage with it and understand that adults are responsible for the vulnerable children in society.
The idea was to encourage the millions of visitors to the arena to go from being just a spectator to becoming engaged in the fight against bullying.
Phase Two: School Tour with Friends
In order to strengthen communication, school tours were conducted to collect children’s experiences of bullying.
This involved small versions of the stadium sculptures traveling around Sweden with representatives from charity Friends: these stories were then dramatized, recorded and published on the initiative’s web hub at arenansbarn.se. (which also hosted more detailed information about the project).
Phase Three: Sweden vs Chile
On 24 March, a few months before the FIFA World Cup, the Swedish men’s national team played a friendly against Chile at Friends Arena.
The miniature sculptures from the school outreach programme returned to Friends Arena and when the players enter the pitch, instead of holding hands with mascot children, they walked in carrying the miniature sculptures that represent bullied children.
The crowd took images and video and shared them socially, while the game was broadcast live across the country – thus sparking a conversation about the anti-bullying programme (and Swedbank’s support of Friends).
The campaign also included targeted paid ads on social media and working with influencers within the sports space such as Pia Sundhage (football coach), Jonas Eriksson (FIFA referee) and Linnea Claesson (sports star and activist) and the whole Sweden national football team.
The 25 life-sized sculptures are now permanently displayed in the arena to remind the millions of visitors to take responsibility to fight bullying.
The team who spearheaded the project at Prime Weber Shandwick (Stockholm) included Robert Aras, Ylva Lindberg, Viktor Bodelius, Sara Tidholm, Per Hansen, Nadine Le Gros and Louise Moberg.
The Friends’ Secretary General sad: “Thanks to this fantastic initiative we’ve raised the question of bullying to a broader audience. We’ve seen a clear increase in traffic and an interest to read more about bullying.”
Outcome
According to the sponsor and agency all the initial goals of the initiative were exceeded within a year and it reached more than 15 million people.
Plus the brand now has a long-term platform to talk about our engagement and the societal problems caused by bullying.
In terms of awareness, post campaign research found that awareness of why the ground was called Friend Arena rose 30% to 75% of all stadium visitors claiming to have knowledge about the cause led naming.
While 50% more of the visitors to the stadium said they’d be willing to donate money to the Friends Foundation.
Plus, for the sponsor, Yougov reports that Swedbank’s brand has grown the most in brand strength of all Swedish brands during the last 12 months.
In terms of media results, Sweden’s top TV channel, TV4, broadcasted the game and attracted 800,000 viewers.
While in the social space, the campaign drove a 124% increased traffic to Friends on Facebook and a 50% increase in traffic to the main website at www.friends.se (with more than 300 stories from children’s experience about bullying were uploaded to the site during the initiative’s first month).
National (eg TT, TV4 and Dagens Nyheter) and international (eg CNN and the Manchester Evening News to specialist football magazines such as FourFourTwo) media organisation covered the project.
While in education terms a lot of Schools contacted the team to see the sculptures which led middle school students being invited to visit Friends Arena and to learn more about the prevention of bullying.
To date more than 2,000 students have visited.
Plus a movie was produced with the team captain Andreas Granqvist which racked up 10 million views, 391,000 likes and comments.
Indeed, the whole Swedish football team received plenty of praise from fans for taking a stand.
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