For any country’s football fans, a national team’s players and its jersey symbolize people’s patriotism. But in Egypt, things were different. After years of failure at the international level, the national Egyptian team’s line-up and jersey were forgotten.

“In the past couple of years, Egypt did not qualify for the African cup”

“if you stop winning, the people eventually lose interest”

“We don’t know the new team”

“No one knows the new players?”

So, when Coca-Cola wanted to support the Egyptian team that had qualified for the African Cup of Nations, its first international tournament in six years, we needed to create excitement about the national team's line up and re-ignite pride in the national jersey, while hijacking a tournament and players, sponsored by coke’s blue competitor.

To disrupt the monopoly of Pepsi, we went far from the games and players. To a ping pong hall in central Cairo. And at first, we created a song that shared the new national team. And its line-up.

The Coca-Cola “Line-Up” song became the most played song from a brand in Egypt. Fans took over, sharing the line-up song. They placed “forbidden” faces on our content. Video bloggers made spoofs and parodies. Songs after each game thanked the players, echoing the line-up song.

The marketing media loved it too!

“You will listen to every word and play it more than once.” (Think Marketing Magazine, MENA)

“Whoever watches this will be humming the song for the rest of the day.” (Campaign Middle East)

“An ingenious way to get Egyptians to learn the players’ names” (Adweek)

Once Egyptians knew the national team’s line-up, we invited them to donate their favourite teams’ jerseys, in exchange for an Egyptian team jersey from Coca-Cola. The jerseys were featured on leading TV shows Thousands came to pop-up shops to exchange foreign jerseys. Foreign jerseys were recycled into blankets and donated. Special edition double-sleeve bottles inspired people to exchange their jerseys The Coca-Cola jerseys became big news being endorsed by the British ambassador in Egypt, TV personalities, Musicians, News channels, mainstream media, and in the parliament, too!

We reached 55% of Egypt’s population.

We earned the highest view-through-rates on YouTube & Twitter with 60% organic views

And beat the blue competitor by 200% more hashtags and 118% more shares than Pepsi’s content, despite 35% of the blue soft drink’s budgets.

With 50% brand love, it overtook Coke’s blue competitor during football season.

Coca-Cola’s football association increased by 10%, total volume sales in the period increased by 130% depicting higher and increased frequency, and total volume sales vs. last year (in the same period) showed an increase of 15%.

The campaign was also awarded at Cannes Lions, Dubai Lynx Effectiveness, MENA Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, The ANDY Awards, Clios, LIA, Chicago International Awards and Cresta.

And though Egypt lost the final, we brought the nation together, putting Coca-Cola at the centre of the momentum, helping the brand hijack an event it didn’t sponsor.