Santander is a Spanish multinational financial services company. For years, it has been supporting sports and specifically football through the sponsorship of major competitions.

Under its global strategy #footballcan which started 2 years ago, the bank promotes the positive impact football CAN have on society as an agent of change capable of transforming the lives of millions of people. Santander uses its football sponsorship as a key business driver through which to transfer brand DNA and connect with audiences reluctant to have an emotional bond with the sector.

Football helps them to break that barrier, but at the same time it requires us to compete in a territory where the best brands are present.

Santander needed to go a step further and continue developing initiatives that help the bank’s purpose of improving people’s lives through football. To do so, they had to come up with ideas that were leveraged on their strategic values: sustainability, inclusion, and diversity.

Football is not perfect. For example, a European football team’s stadium consumes an average of 8 million KW/hour per year, which is equivalent to the annual electric expenditure of 2,500 households. Gender pay gap: Ada Hegerberg, was the first woman to win a golden ball, a historical feat in 2018, nevertheless, she earned three hundred times less than her male counterpart Leo Messi.

There is still a long way to go, but we wanted to let society know that Santander is not only sensible to these issues, but that it is also taking concrete steps to change things.

Objectives:

• Raise awareness of the importance of inclusion, diversity, and sustainability through football.
• Generate conversation about the challenges of the future of football.
• Convey the bank’s values through a long-term project.
• Generate general awareness and strengthen Banco’s Santander positioning globally.

The creative idea is imagining what the football of the future might look like, we instilled that in all our campaign initiatives that align with the bank’s purpose and contribute to diversity, inclusion, and sustainability through the “Beautiful Game”.

To deliver on its commitment to make football more open and environmentally conscious, Santander and GSIC (powered by Microsoft) created an international innovation contest to reward tech ideas and solutions that make the football world better.

From what was initially a startup challenge, we designed a project with a great transmedia journey that pursued the involvement of the whole society at an international level to achieve together the purpose of making football better.

The idea of the football of the future was conveyed through various editorial content, video pills, strong presence on Twitter with various formats, TV programs, streams with influencers and the production of two documentaries.

+200 startups around the world participated in the challenge.

3 startups are developing their prototypes thanks to Santander and GSIC to improve football.

The campaign had a total of 219M impressions among all its formats.

In the 5 countries where it was active, it reached 63.5M people.

The audio-visual formats reached 864M viewers (duplicated) and 30.8M views.

The formats had 19.8M user interactions.

Documentaries likeability of 70% in Spain (89% Italy. 62% UK).

76% brand attribution.

5-point contribution to brand awareness among those who watched the documentaries.