“The return of the Champions” is one of the few examples in which the sequel of a blockbuster movie happens on advertising blocks instead of cinemas. In order to do this, we picked up the story where the movie ended and created three new chapters with the new adventures of its main characters. This type of original content, between branding and entertainment, made the spin-off a big success across the country, making the brand obtain its best results ever on sales, notoriety and reputation.

For more than 80 years, ONCE has provided social services to the blind and other disabled groups through the ONCE Foundation. It is the only social lottery operator that, through the sale of its products, provides employment, education, access to technology, and a range of services to people with disabilities.

In recent years, the growing proliferation in Spain of betting houses and gaming operators with very aggressive sales strategies have prompted the government to impose new, much more restrictive industry regulations.

In this context, ONCE needed to strengthen its position as a social gaming operator, by promoting its social aspect as an added value to the gaming experience and thus increasing the positive perception of its product, while enriching the role of the player at the same time.

“The return of the Champions” is a spin-off of the movie “Champions” one of the biggest blockbusters in Spanish cinemas. Only this time, the sequel wasn’t released on cinemas but on advertising blocks, sponsored by ONCE, a lottery whose benefits help people with disabilities. We created three new chapters with the new adventures of the main characters in “Champions” and picked up the story where the movie ended, creating new extra content that was released on Internet. Later, when Spanish legislation banned the use of celebrities on Gambling and Gaming advertising, we

followed-up the movie with a new story and new main characters, reversing the usual order by introducing the new cast on a branded content before they star in the movie on cinemas.

To distinguish ONCE from other gaming operators and highlight its social work helping people with disabilities, we created “When you play, we all play” To relay this message, we decided to do a spin-off of “Champions” a movie that starred people with disabilities. Only this sequel will be released on advertising blocks instead of cinemas. Right when the campaign was hitting its best results ever in the history of the brand, Spanish legislation banned the use of celebrities on Gambling and Gaming Advertising.

So we decided to create three new chapters of the story with a new cast of characters that weren’t famous yet: The “Championettes”. This new campaign has not only multiplied sales and notoriety for ONCE but also brought it back to the social conversation.

“The Return of the Champions” is a spin-off of the film Champions, but instead of releasing it in theatres, we developed a publicity campaign. We created three chapters of new adventures for the characters (who pick up the story right where the movie left off) to be broadcast on television. We also created a whole series of extra content for distribution on the internet. When the law prohibited celebrities from advertising gaming, we decided to create a continuation of the film with new characters: The Championettes. We scripted a new story, launched three new episodes for television, and created a series of digital content to learn more about the new characters and the brand’s social work. All content was supplemented by a transverse publicity campaign.

The campaign achieved historic results for the brand:

1. The largest unprompted advertising recall in the history of the Cupón Diario and the Paga;

2. Prompted recall reached 73.8%, much higher than the ONCE average;

3. Admirable brand recognition (+25%), relative to minimal media pressure (+7%);

4. Very high visibility rate (76%), compared to the ONCE average (48%);

5. Very high recall of the campaign’s slogan (84%): “When you play, we all play.”

6. Very high figure (88%) for a campaign issued with the ONCE brand;

7. And most importantly, we managed to convey the message clearly: Buying an ONCE ticket means helping others and contributing to ONCE’s social endeavours (53%).