In a sector ruled by odds-driven marketing, our brief was to cut through the clutter to earn the attention and win the hearts of football fans at the start of the season.

Here in the UK, over two million people are addicted to gambling. Football clubs are addicted too, with nearly 60% of the top UK clubs taking handouts in the form of lucrative shirt sponsorship deals from betting firms (amounting to over £250m in club revenue). Great for betting companies, but less so for society and the fans, who have become walking billboards.

True to its position, Paddy Power said Enough of the Nonsense™.

In order to make Paddy Power as the good guys, we needed to behave radically different to our competitors. By giving back to the fans, rather than exploiting them. And, we knew there was one asset that fans value above all else: Their shirt.

Save Our Shirt.

The campaign was born with a sole purpose to return the sacred shirt back to the fans – a symbolic gesture backing the very people who make the beautiful game…well, beautiful: The fans themselves.

It might sound grand and serious and game-changing. And it is some of those things – but at its core Save Our Shirt was a simple, common sense call for sponsors to stop bastardising football shirts and to return them to their rightful owners.

This issue wasn’t one owned or controlled by Paddy Power. We simply started the ball rolling, encouraging everyone who feels slighted, exploited, or a bit embarrassed to wear their shirt out, to join us and the Save Our Shirt movement.

Our big strategic idea was a commitment to ‘Unsponsor Football,’ removing our logo from the sacred shirt and gifting it back to the fans so they could wear it with pride again, clean, de-logo-ed and pure.

We identified and reached out to a portfolio of progressive football clubs spanning British football, with the recently relegated Huddersfield Town AFC acting as our anchor club for our campaign.

Because front of shirt sponsorship accounts for only 15% of the overall media value in an average sponsorship deal, we made the bet that the PR value gained from our campaign would far outstrip any lost in media value from forgoing our logo on the front of their shirt. And we were right.

We made fans the lead actors in their own reality TV drama. First, we drew their ire to raise awareness of the issue. Next, we captured their hearts through an unprecedented act of generosity.

The Bait

We stoked outrage of football’s toxic relationship with betting by unveiling a fake Huddersfield kit – with a supersized sash logo splashed across the front.

By lunchtime, the kit was trending worldwide on social media.

Greeted by boos and demands for the kit to be banned, Huddersfield wore the shirt for a real match against Rochdale. By morning, the story had made national TV news, and the Football Association had begun an investigation.

Meanwhile, we stayed quiet as the story dominated the news.

The Switch

Amidst the meltdown, we revealed the real ‘logo-less’ shirt and launched ‘Save Our Shirt.’ We ‘unsponsored’ four more clubs and extended the campaign through TV, OOH, press and social.

‘Save Our Shirt’ was covered in hundreds of media outlets globally, even making it on to BBC Breakfast and Sky Sports news amongst 300+ news stories.

The campaign generated 13,200,000 organic social engagements and 743,000,000 impressions, contributing to a 100% spike in awareness and 600% in consideration – in just 11 days.

Huddersfield’s shirt became the 6th best-selling strip in the UK (ahead of four Premier League giants). The fake shirts even became collector’s items, raising £30k for charity. One now sits in the National Football Hall of Fame.

However, most important was the real-world impact.

In February, the UK Sports Minister announced a review of the Gambling Act, with a view to outlawing betting brands from front of shirt sponsorship. They even cited ‘Save Our Shirt’ as inspiration for this impending legislation.