The Social Swap is an entirely social idea. We used Twitter (X) to deliver an unexpected creative stunt, exposing gender bias and earning attention worldwide. Jill Scott and Gary Neville, two of the UK’s most famous ex-footballers and football commentators, secretly swapped places and posted from each other’s accounts during the UEFA Champions League. Sexist responses rolled in – to who people thought was tweeting. Choice of social platform was central to the strategy, allowing for anonymity, reach and reveal - and with 5.7M followers between Gary and Jill combined, provided us a vast audience for the social channel stunt.

Heineken® has a strong focus on sports sponsorship, including rugby, racing and many others – and of course football.

Misogynistic hate speech abounds across the board in sports, whenever women are highlighted or share their opinions. The problem is especially evident in football – and with the growth of women’s football and female pundits, it’s getting worse.

Twitter is a particular hot bed for hateful comments and misogyny towards female sports pundits, players and women in general. Comments like those exposed in our campaign (e.g ‘Get back in the kitchen’ and ‘leave football to the boys’) are every day occurrences.

Gary Neville (male) and Jill Scott (female) are extremely successful ex-footballers and have both played for England. They are both now commentators.

Context:

Gender stereotypes and prejudice mean that female sports pundits face a disproportionate amount of discrimination and hateful comments on social media when sharing their football views. This creates a toxic and uncomfortable environment for fans and professionals.

Heineken® believes that sports should be enjoyable and inclusive for everyone. As the official sponsor for both the Women’s and Men’s UEFA Champion Leagues, Heineken® want to challenge the gender biases in football and help stop these toxic online behaviours.

The UEFA club finals in May & June 2023 provided the perfect opportunity to tackle the issue.

Brief:

Develop an earned activation around the UEFA club finals (May/June 2023) to raise awareness around gender inequality in football.

KPIs:

• 500M+ PR Impressions

• 5K+ Mentions across social & editorial

• Press coverage across 10 countries

• Achieve 85% neutral to positive sentiment

Women receive abuse when they post their opinions about football online. Time and time again, we've seen female pundits and fans face torrents of online sexism in response to their comments on the game – even when their opinions are identical to male colleagues.

How could we expose this gender hypocrisy?

Idea: The Social Swap.

We had two of Britain’s most famous ex-footballers and football commentators, Jill Scott and Gary Neville, comment on X during five UEFA Champions League Matches.

Secretly, Gary and Jill switched social media accounts and commented from each other’s handles, so their opinions appeared to come from each other.

As predicted, Jill Scott’s account received five times more sexist comments than Gary Neville’s, including remarks like ‘Get back in the kitchen’.

Later we revealed the stunt to press & public (film & release), exposing gender biases and championing Heineken’s® belief that football is for all fans.

Target audience:

• General football fans who follow on socials.

• Gen-Z football fans around the world who want to rally behind a social cause to help make football a more inclusive environment.

Approach:

• To highlight the issue of sexism in football we first needed an unexpected and undeniable way to expose the problem.

• Swapping Jill and Gary’s accounts without the public knowing would allow us to see if people were reacting to the gender of the commenter, rather than the content of their comment.

• Gary and Jill's fame would ensure a high volume of responses to their commentary and would help drive attention to the problem once revealed.

Relevance to platform:

• X is the place where the majority of football commentary lives, and where the greatest amount of sexist abuse towards women takes place. It was the perfect setting for our stunt.

Gary Neville and Jill Scott MBE shared their opinions about football matches from each other’s X accounts over five days and matches.

We recorded the sentiment and any sexist abuse responses.

A hero film explained the social swap, revealing the results of the experiment to fans around the world and tackling the issue with humour and clarity.

We ran an earned-centric amplification strategy across 35 markets, which included broadcast exclusives, in-depth interviews with talent, newswires, content creator outreach and media partnerships with global news titles Including BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Goal.com

Heineken® wanted to go further and improve the online environment on social media for all fans.

We purchased 5000 licenses for AI-powered moderation tool Arwen and made these available for fans to download, allowing them to filter out sexist and racists comments from their own feeds.

A campaign microsite facilitated the distribution of Arwen licences to fans.

• 8% more women joined football conversations on Twitter after the campaign*

• There was 230% increase amongst women in the belief that ‘Heineken Promotes Diversity & Inclusion'

Results were 3x Heineken®’s previous football campaign.

Coverage & Reach

• 7,800 Mentions across online news and social media (2,800 above target)

• 94% Neutral to positive sentiment (9% above target)

• 122K Engagements

• 1.4B+ Impressions (280% vs. KPI)

• 35+ countries (350% vs. target)

Paid Social

• 226M Impressions

• 77M Campaign film Views at 100% completion

• 42% Completion rate

Organic Social

• 1.6M Film views

• 2,700 Engagements

*Measured tracking two key female football conversation hashtags, pre and post campaign.

1. #womeninfootball: 8% increase in female users using it after the campaign: March-May 23 at 39% female users vs June-Sept 23 at 47% female users

2. #womensfootball: 7% increase from 28% female to 35% female