The campaign launched by LaLiga (The best professional football league in the world) is based on an entertaining short film. It’s a period super production that invites viewers to reflect uncomfortably about racism in sport. The short film set in Nazi Germany stars a black athlete in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, but surprisingly all of the dialogues are racist tweets from today. It’s a powerful new way to denounce racist users: using an entertaining short film … that the same racist users have unwittingly created.

Sport is the context where the most racist comments are made, with special hostility and aggressiveness in the world of football. When it comes to denouncing these racist users, LaLiga chose the most powerful and striking way: transform their own tweets into a film script for a branded content piece set in Nazi Germany. In the content we see the route of an Afro-American sportsman through the streets in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, as he suffers all kinds of derogatory comments because of the colour of his skin. The surprise isn’t revealed until the end of the piece, when we inform that the comments viewers have seen are really modern day tweets and that the purpose of this branded content is to denounce the racist behaviour of these users who usually go unpunished and unnoticed on social media.

Over 2 million racist tweets were posted in just over 1 year, 2 out of every 3 black sportsmen and women claim to have experienced racism and 85% of fans admit to reading or hearing these types of comments. Racism on social media is so widespread that users are immune to the barbaric comments. The only way to impact them about the problem is to use a different strategy: entertaining content that reflects on their behaviour … using their own tweets as a script. An invitation to reflect on how some of these unacceptable comments go unnoticed. The target is specifically the whole twitter community and society in general.

The branded content is a short film of 2:51” duration set in Nazi Germany.Our protagonist is an Afro-American athlete who is taking part in the 1936 berlin Olympic Games.During the whole film we see the sportsman walking around Berlin and we observe the reactions of people who see him. They all make nasty comments:a ticket clerk comments that he “should go back to Africa”.A woman sitting at a café table says they “should put all the blacks on a ship and sink it”. A boy in the street comments that the black sportsman “looks like a monkey”.Someone in the vicinity of the stadium shouts “blacks are destroying sport”. Finally our protagonist reaches the Olympic Stadium heartbroken by the insults.The surprise comes at the end when a text explains to viewers that all the comments in the film are actually tweets from the modern day against modern day athletes.

The branded content obtained 121 million impacts, it was broadcast in its entirety as a news item on 5 of the main 6 national TV channels (the brand leading the project is LaLiga, the Spanish Professional Football League) generating over 2,45 million Euros in earn media and shaking up social media to the point where there was a fall in racist comments in Spain the weekend following its launch.