Irish bookmaker Paddy Power required a creative strategy that would drive mass awareness and brand engagement to promote betting in the run up to the World Cup.

The brief required a content driven approach that would resonate with their core target audience of 18-35 year old sports fans.

Our creative challenge was to cut through the noise when rival betting, sports and consumer brands were all fighting for the same share of voice around the year’s greatest sporting tournament.

Our strategy was driven by Paddy Power’s cheeky and irreverent tone of voice as well as an opportunistic approach to hijacking the news agenda.

The creative would be built around original and newsworthy sporting insights that would inspire debate, aid betting decisions and create national news headlines for Paddy Power in the run up to the tournament.

Enter Professor Stephen Hawking - could we partner with Britain’s greatest scientific mind, to help explain the variables that might contribute to England success in Brazil 2014?

We already knew that the Professor had little interest in football however our proposition was rooted in mathematical principles and based upon a statistical analysis of England’s performances on the World football stage. It was a long shot, but we had an inkling that the idea may just appeal to his famously dry sense of humour.

It did. Professor Hawking agreed to take part and the core idea became the flagship creative platform for Paddy Power’s pre-world cup marketing campaign.

With the report, pictures and video completed it was time to present the findings to the media at a packed press conference held at The Savoy Hotel, London.

Professor Stephen Hawking delivered his presentation and Paddy Power (himself) ran a question and answer session.

Media guests live-tweeted the findings from the report and Paddy Power’s social team deployed picture led updates to their 500,000 strong social media following in real time.

The press release, video, images, report and a full transcript of the event were all shared within minutes of the event concluding via an FTP link containing all the assets.

We used the press conference stage to film an exclusive interview with the BBC’s flagship TV news programme Newsnight for transmission later that evening.

Over 1,000 credited news items

• Paddy Power shot to seventh place in the global brand index (above all other betting brands) on the eve of the biggest betting market of 2014

• Led to a turnover of €132 million – more than 10% above target €100 million, with a raft of new sign-ups

• Branded coverage in every national newspaper and major news site in the UK plus key trendsetters such as Mashable and Vice

• A fully credited three minute TV feature on the UK’s agenda–setting news show Newsnight as well as BBC Breakfast, Sky Sports News and BBC TV regional coverage in 15 different regions

• National radio stations - XFM, Talksport, BBC 5 Live as well as 60 regional BBC and commercial stations

• International coverage - Time Magazine, NBC and LA Times

• A global twitter trend with 54 Million Twitter impressions in 24 hours