2024 Bronze Inclusive Marketing

Agency: Edelman and LePub Milan

Client: Heineken

Entry Title: The Social Swap

Executive Summary

An entirely social idea used X to deliver an unexpected creative stunt, exposing gender bias and earning attention worldwide.

Strategy

Gen Z football fans around the world want to rally behind a social cause to help make football a more inclusive environment. To highlight the issue of sexism in football the campaign team first needed an unexpected and undeniable way to expose the problem. Female pundits and fans face torrents of online sexism in response to their comments on the game - even when their opinions are identical to those by male colleagues. How could this gender hypocrisy be exposed?

Swapping footballers Jill Scott’s and Gary Neville’s accounts without the public knowing enabled Heineken to see if

Creativity

As predicted, Jill’s account received five times more sexist comments than Gary’s including remarks like “Get back in the kitchen”. Sentiment and sexist abuse were recorded. Later, the stunt was revealed to press and public via film and press, exposing gender biases and championing the brand’s belief that football is for all fans, while tackling the issue with humour and clarity.

Earned-centric amplification strategy ran across 35 markets, including broadcast exclusives, in-depth interviews with talent, newswires, content creator outreach, and media partnerships with global news titles including BuzzFeed, HuffPost and goal.com. Some 5,000 licences for AI-powered moderation tool Arwen were bought and made available for fans to download, allowing them to filter out sexist and racists comments from their own feeds.

Results

The results were triple those of Heineken’s previous football campaign and included a significant increase in international coverage. This led to important conversations about gender bias regarding women in football and helped open the door for more women to participate.

Overall, 8% more women joined football conversations on X after the campaign. There were 7,800 mentions across online news and social media (2,800 above target); 94% neutral to positive sentiment (9% above target); 122,000 engagements and 1.4 billion+ impressions (280% vs. KPI). Brand Perception Survey data showed a 230% increase among women in the belief that ‘Heineken Promotes Diversity & Inclusion’.

The Team

Edelman - Judy John, Global CCO - Mattias Ronge, EMEA CCO - Stefan Ronge, EMEA CCO - Martin Jon Adolfsson, Creative Director - Martin Noreby, Associate Creative Director - Simon Lublin, Associate Creative Director - Mike Chivers, Earned Creative - Ethan Tuxford Client Director - Harry Zelenka Martin, Associate Client Director - Sebastien-Nicolas Chiffrin, Account Manager - Patrick Quirk, Account Executive - Samantha Bui, Senior Project Manager

LePub - Bruno Bertelli, Global CEO - Cristiana Boccassini, Global CCO - Mihnea Gheorghiu, CCO - Marie Poumeyrol, Creative Director - Nicholas Bakshi, Creative Director - Joao Araujo, Art Director - Katharina Haller, Senior Copywriter - Nithika Romy, Junior Art Director - Shrutunjay Gupta, Junior Copywriter - Isabella Cecconi, GlobalHead of PR & Communication - Eleonora Botta, PR Manager - James Moore, Group Strategy Director - Davide Corti, Client Service Director - Vittorio Cafiero, Head of Digital Production - Valentina Salaro, Head of Social & Content - Natalia Cortes, Social Media Manager - Lara Simoniello, Social Media Manager - Francesca Zazzera, Chief Production Officer - Cinzia Morandi Producer - Caswell Coggins, Director - Alessio Zazzera, Exec Producer - Daniel Trapp, DOP