This campaign takes the story of the main characters in the Spanish blockbuster Champions where we left it and picks it up from there to tell us what happened next.

The spot has the main characters reunited once again. This time, they have won a big prize playing ONCE, a lottery whose benefits help promote the inclusion of people with disabilities. Wondering what to do with the money, they decide to ask their former coach -who left to coach Spain’s National Football Team- to sign up with them once again. He’s reluctant to do so at first, but he ends up accepting the challenge on one condition: This time, they won’t accept the runner-up position. This year, they will play to win.

The spot delivers a simple message: When you play, we all play. Because whenever we play with ONCE, we’re helping people with disabilities play a bigger.

“The return of the Champions” is the spin-off of Spanish blockbuster and award-winning “Champions” a movie that told the story of a basketball team whose players all have intellectual disabilities. Only this spin-off didn’t happen on movie theatres… but on advertising blocks.

The announcer is ONCE, a Spanish lottery known for using its benefits to help all kinds of people with disabilities and promote their inclusion in the workplace.

So we picked up the story where “Champions” ended and developed three spots that worked as three new chapters of the original movie. All of them directed, once again, by Javier Fesser,

Later, when Spanish legislation banned the use of celebrities on gambling and gaming advertising, we followed-up the campaign with a new all-female cast that was not famous… yet.

“The Championettes”

“The return of the Champions” is a spin-off of the movie “Champions” that wasn’t released on cinemas, but on advertising blocks. It stars people with intellectual disabilities. The first wave of our campaign featured the stars of the original movie, but when Spanish legislation banned the use of celebrities on Gambling and Gaming Advertising, we decided to use our second wave campaign to introduce audiences to the future new cast in the sequel of Champions (“Championettes”) before they became celebrities.

We did an advertising casting with cinema standards, searching for our new cast in different special education centers which more than 250 people with disabilities participating in it. And then we turned them into the most famous actors in the country.