The fundamental barrier to women’s football viewership is a lack of visibility. Research commissioned by the Female Quotient and DAZN showed a ‘coverage gap’ between men and women’s sport. 64% of consumers globally say they don’t watch women’s sports because they don’t know enough about the athletes/teams, don’t have as many opportunities to watch, or aren’t aware where they can watch games.

The brief was to ensure global awareness of DAZN’s ground-breaking deal to broadcast all UEFA Women’s Champions Leagues fixtures for free on YouTube.The campaign also ultimately aimed to tackle the ‘coverage gap’, by making women’s sports more accessible, increasing visibility and growing the UWCL audience.

Objectives:

- Drive subscription to the DAZN Uefa Women’s Champions League channel on YouTube

- Trend on social media across key markets in Europe, North America, and Asia

- Show DAZN are credible to existing women’s football fans, and inspirational to new ones

By increasing viewership of the UWCL, we increase the number of fans, which leads to more tickets being sold, more cameras in the stadiums, which results in better quality footage, this drives advertising spend, which leads to an increase in investment into the game, which leads to an increase in coaching for the next generation.

Our idea was to illustrate this virtuous circle, by telling an emotive story that opens on a set of eyes, which kick starts a snowball effect, igniting every touch point of the game.

This virtuous circle benefits not just the women’s game, but football as a whole, demonstrated succinctly through the final line: We All Rise With More Eyes.

The strategy was to launch a global campaign in order to kickstart the mission of DAZN and partners UEFA and YouTube to increase visibility and global audience for UWCL in a way that had never been done before.

We wanted to inspire sports fans around the world in showing them that they can play a major role in the progress of women's football simply by watching a game which is now, for the first time ever, easily accessible to them.

The ‘We All Rise series’ premiered with the ‘We All Rise with More Eyes’ short campaign film, conveying the importance of having ‘more eyes’ on women’s sport through increased sports broadcasting. Accompanying this was a global announcement event hosted on YouTube, featuring executives and players including Ada Hegerberg, Lucy Bronze. Global coverage was then secured in key international markets along with research from DAZN and The Female Quotient.

Implementation:

The story and script was developed in collaboration with a steering committee of grassroots players, coaches, professional players, and UEFA board members to ensure DAZN truly understood the women's game.

Footage was collected from clubs and athletes across Europe.

DAZN committed to its strategy to empower female storytellers within the sports broadcasting world, and so the film’s director, producer and editor were all female. Additionally, the voiceover was recorded by female rapper FLOHIO. Finally, to ensure global engagement with the story, all communications were transcreated into 10+ languages.

Timeline:

The campaign launched when the deal was announced by UEFA, DAZN and YouTube. It ran from the June 30th 2021, to round 1 of the tournament on 17th August 2021.

Placement:

In partnership with YouTube, the film ran as Mastheads and pre-rolls. With UEFA, clubs and the world's greatest athletes, bespoke IG posts were created to ensure maximum reach.

With no paid media support, the campaign got 2.15m views, with 5.1m impressions; there were 56k unique engagements, from football fans, clubs, and global superstars such as Ada Hegerberg; 85k subscribed to the DAZN UWCL YouTube channel.

The landmark deal dominated global headlines and 2,013 stories went live across 71 countries in 48 hours, shattering records as DAZN’s biggest global announcement ever by coverage volume. Sentiment was 100% positive in the media and social activity was nonstop and emotive, with 7,000+ mentions globally reaching millions.

The campaign solidified DAZN’s long-term commitment to women’s sport and was groundbreaking on the platform. Bloomberg called it “a breakthrough for women’s soccer”. The Athletic wrote “How significant is this for the women’s game? Huge.” Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy remarked “the interest in women's football could reach a sensational turning point” while Mundo Deportivo in Spain described it as “DAZN’s masterstroke with women’s soccer”.