In the wake of the 2018 World Cup, Nike Football set out to launch a new boot: the PhantomVSN. As young footballers around the world prepared for their upcoming season, we wanted to make this boot the must-have for the pitch, using Nike’s stable of amazing athletes, influencers and footballing talent to spread the message of this new boot and its benefits. And make Phantom the top selling premium football boot of the season.

We unleashed upon the world a mysterious character called THE PHANTOM - a demonic football freak capable of wreaking havoc on all those who cross its path. The film itself spread dark and mysterious rumours among footballers everywhere, leaving everyone wondering WHO or WHAT the PHANTOM was…

Our target audience (12-18 year old football fanatics) want to be the type of player that can do it all. Create havoc in midfield. Nutmeg the opposition. Run with the ball glued to their boot or square defenders up before striking an incredible goal. The fanatics want to be deceptive by nature and extremely precise - so they can become unpredictable to the opposition and a constant threat.

The positioning of the PhantomVSN boot plays directly into the idea of unpredictability and threat - two key motivators for our target audience. And the execution dramatised and elevated those messages within the film via the menacing character of the Phantom.

24-hours before our film went public, we used top footballers’ Instagram Stories to “leak” the film to their millions of followers via a "secret" Whatsapp Phantom number - that shared the the un-released film.

The film was then officially released on Nike’s YouTube channel and paid media kicked in to support the campaign.

All the athletes and influencers within the film also shared teasers and swipe ups that pushed our target audience to view the main film. Each social asset was customized for where an athlete posted it - we created cinematic in-feed trailers for IG/FB feeds and full-screen vertical content shot on mobile for IG Stories.

The film drove 200M views globally, and delivered the highest completion rate of a long-form film in paid media on YouTube (in North America) - indicating the power of the mysterious story of the Phantom. It also drove positive uplifts in all metrics globally (brand awareness, favourability, and consideration) in a YouTube brand lift study.