In Italy most of the branded entertainment projects are set in the TV business.

TV shows are the most common cases. We can easily understand that this means a huge money investment. And in this period, a glocal brand like the Adidas Italian Rugby sponsorship does not have the chance to enter the TV entertainment arena.

On July 2012, Adidas became the sponsor of the Italian rugby team, launching the new official jersey.

The first match Italy will wear it, is against the gigantic AllBlacks

We wanted to give them more power to proudly face the New Zealand HAKA.

That’s why we created our own new Italian one: a user generated Italian rugby anthem.

We started to compose the anthem by collecting recorded voices about rugby.

•The first messages come from interviews from Italian rugby schools.

•Others are recorded by fans using a Facebook and mobile app.

•The national team adds words picked up from fans during promo events

Thousands of messages, phrases, opinions: the most faithful voices of Italian rugby.

And to make it more intense, we mixed them with the sounds of the rugby players

making an engaging anthem.

We went directly to the audience. We travelled all around Italy going to the rugby school asking young players to leave us a message about what rugby is for them. We also built a mobile and Facebook app where everybody could leave his/her personal message. In addiction to that, the national team players went down on the streets during a promo store event asking the audience support.

Using a non traditional media we expanded our audience.

•1824 voices submitted.

•a fully integrated campaign created completely by users.

•blogs, magazine and all the major sport programs converted this project into news talking about the sponsorship: millions of euro of free advertising.

•More than a million views on YouTube

•More than 10,000 fans on the international Adidas rugby Facebook page.

56% came from Italy.

•thousands of users downloaded the anthem online.

•€110.000 sell out during the first match.

•at the end of the 6 nations the anthem became a media reaching more than 300 million people all across Europe.

Not bad for a country that only talks about soccer