White Paper
PUMA Football
Issue 27 | June 2013
Agency
Droga5
Creative Team
Creative Chairman David Droga Executive Creative Directors Nik Studzinski Ted Royer Copywriter Erik Hogfeldt Art Director Petter Hernmarck
Production Team
Head Of Integrated Production Sally-Ann Dale Junior Producer Sarah Frances Hartley Production Company Hungryman
Other Credits
Planning Director Veda Partalo Group Account Director Nick Phelps
Date
August, 2012
Background
European men have two great loves: their wives and their football clubs. But which one do they love more? In time for the Premier League kickoff, PUMA conducted a scientific study to find the answer to this age-old question. Together with the University of Bristol and Newcastle United, the brand gathered the most hardcore European fans and performed a series of tests designed to reveal what they really felt. The results? Science proved that men love their wives almost five times more than their clubs. Which wasn’t the result our participants hoped for, but maybe just what their relationships needed.
Idea
PUMA White Paper: success relied purely on PR. The study was captured in a short documentary, and the scientific results were written up as a White Paper for publication in scientific journals and sent to sports publications around the world. This put PUMA right where every sports brand wants to be: at the center of the sports discussion. The articles led readers to loveorfootball.com, where users watched our documentary, read the White Paper study and did an interactive test to see what they love more: their team or their partner.
Results
The story was taken up by major newspapers and magazines around the world. Featured and discussed on major TV and radio networks around Europe, generating 569 million media impressions.
It has inspired the scientific community to keep investigating men’s affection for football by creating more studies in 2013.
Our Thoughts
Simon Silvester was a planner who understood the value of PR in advertising long before most other people. When we worked together at BWBC in the early 1990’s, he would produce one ‘scientific’ study a year about teens or shifting attitudes in society, which would be taken up by newspapers everywhere and, we hoped, lead to new business. He continued to do this at Y&R, publishing several online ‘books’.
(You can download ‘How to dominate the world’ at: http://www.wpp.com/wpp/ marketing/branding/how-to-dominate-the- world)
We published ‘Think French’ in Directory 18. Simon died suddenly and unexpectedly four months ago. I spoke to him a week before he died about a piece he was going to write for Directory about the rise and rise of PR as a brand-building tool. He would have loved this campaign and would probably have written about it in his article.