On July 2012 Adidas became the sponsor of the italian rugby team, launching the new official jersey. In Italy rugby is not famous and popular as soccer. So selling a rugby jersey needs an extra effort. We needed to ingnite the passion directly from the fans.

We asked the fans to create a user generated rugby anthem to spread the word and the passion about the italian rugby in order to activate a word of mouth about the italian rugby team and so about the new 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.

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 6nations the anthem became a media reaching more than 300 million people all across europe

•not bad for a country that only talks about soccer

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.