The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ was blatantly corrupt. Despite mounting media scrutiny, most brands remained silent, essentially giving FIFA a free pass.

BrewDog has always been anti-establishment and pro the people and simply couldn’t stay silent.

Our brief was to capitalise on the year’s biggest global sporting event to get people talking about BrewDog.

BrewDog was set up to challenge corporate mediocrity in beer, in the belief that people deserved better.

When the world’s biggest sporting event was taken away from the fans and given through corruption to an authoritarian nation state, we saw an opportunity to put the BrewDog world view onto the world stage.

This wasn’t a World Cup, it was a World F*Cup. So we took a stand to proudly launch BrewDog as the official anti-sponsor of the World F*Cup.

Our approach was simple: to use outdoor media to say out loud what official sponsors were not, all whilst raising funds for charity with all money from Lost Lager sold during the tournament going towards fighting human rights abuse.

BrewDog was set up to challenge corporate mediocrity in beer, in the belief that people deserved better.

When the world’s biggest sporting event was taken away from the fans and given through corruption to an authoritarian nation state, we saw an opportunity to put the BrewDog world view at the heart of the cultural and media conversation.

This wasn’t a World Cup, it was a World F*Cup. So we took a stand to proudly launch BrewDog as the official anti-sponsor of the World F*Cup.

Our approach was simple: to say out loud what official sponsors were not, all whilst raising funds for charity with all money from Lost Lager sold during the tournament going towards fighting human rights abuse.

Enter World F*Cup. We developed a creative device that would walk the copyright infringement line as well as call out the copyright owners in typical BrewDog style.

We kicked things off with punchy outdoor media designed to light up social media. From ‘The Beautiful Shame,’ to ‘Eat, Sleep, Bribe Football’ and ‘First Russia, then Qatar. Can’t wait for North Korea.’ Stills, videos and vox pops were shared with media owners and social media creators.

We then used social media and our bespoke bit of language and typeface to hijack news headlines in real time throughout the entire tournament. Headlines and news stories were reframed to highlight what a f*ck up this was.

The work ran between w/c 7th November and w/c 28th November in OOH and for the remainder of the World Cup (18th Dec) in social media.

We made the issue impossible to ignore and kick started a global wave of earned media including 286 pieces of coverage and 576M earned impressions. Most importantly, BrewDog raised £111,153.00 for human rights charities.