To ensure strong ticket sales, Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL) needed to get the whole country hyped for the start of the 2019 Premiership season, well before it even kicked off.

The only problem? No one’s thinking about footy in January.

In fact, at that time of year, Australia’s die-hard sports fans are all completely transfixed by a very different type of football: the Super Bowl.

We needed to do something to bring fans’ attention back to our game, but knew we’d have to go up against the most over-crowded, uber-expensive (and highly litigious!) sports event in the world.

America thinks it’s the greatest country in the world - and American sport is no exception. Every February their fans, players, and pundits loudly proclaim that their Super Bowl winning-team are the “World Champions” of football, despite the fact that the NFL is an entirely national league.

This year, we decided it was time someone did something about it…

So one week before Super Bowl LIII, Australia’s NRL took on America’s NFL at their own game, and crowned their own World Champions: the 2018 Premiership-winning Sydney Roosters.

After all, the NRL boasts 15 teams from Australia and 1 team from New Zealand (that’s 100% more nations than the NFL) so if America can claim “World Champ” status, why couldn’t we?

To break through the wall of advertising noise (and genuine Super Bowl stories) that circulate in the build-up to the big game, we knew we’d have to cultivate controversy across two continents worth of sports fans.

Our strategy was for three billboard placements at the heart of the Super Bowl host city to ignite a conversation back in Australia about our “World Champions” of football.

This meant that our initial target audience was American Super Bowl and NFL fans. Because it was only by stoking their indignant outcry that we’d then reach our true target audience: Australian sports fans (whose attention had wandered over to American football and needed to be brought back home).

Buying up the biggest billboard space that we could find in the Super Bowl LIII host city of Atlanta, Georgia, we celebrated the Roosters’ World Championship in a way that the locals, and the media, couldn’t ignore.

The giant proclamation of victory was designed as an homage to the epic (and slightly tacky) banners, flags, and fan merch that Super Bowl-winning NFL teams release each year.

When these billboards were unveiled in Atlanta, they immediately got local fans talking; we just had to make sure they were talking to our cameras.

A social video full of their bemused and outraged reactions took the story global, from the US to the UK to New Zealand, and gave the Australian media and fans something to talk about that wasn’t Tom Brady.

The stunt was called “a promotional invasion of Atlanta” (FoxSports), “a cheeky jab” (Sporting News), a “Super Bowl sledge” (Daily Telegraph), and absolute “garbage” (a local Atlantan man)...

But Australians loved it.

Our 3 billboards created 35.5 million media impressions, and got the entire Australian fanbase talking about our league at a time when they’re usually focused on America’s big game.

(Sorry Patriots, but we’re the champs now.)