Puma – The Hardchorus

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Puma is running a football-related advertising campaign connecting soccer with romance with “The Hardchorus”. Football players and fans sing love songs like they’d sing them in the stands. “They want to be in your arms.You want to be in the stands. What do you do when Valentines Day falls on game day?” For the English speaking world there’s a version of Savage Garden’s Truly Madly Deeply. For the Italian speaking world there’s a version of Umberto Tozzi’s 1977 hit Ti Amo.

Costing the equivalent of just five 30-second World Cup 2010 TV spots, the ‘HardChorus’ campaign doubled weekly store sales and delivered 1.8 million unique visitors to Puma online. Our objective was to engage directly with everyday football fans, regardless of team or player preferences. Research into aspects of love and football produced a unique, dual insight : fans’ love for the game tends to either fulfil a lack of personal relationships or create tension in existing ones. For the first time in 11 years the day of LOVE (Valentine’s Day) clashed with the day of FOOTBALL (Sunday), providing an unmissable opportunity to dramatise and amplify the LOVE=FOOTBALL concept. We created the Puma ‘HardChorus’ video, which featured real hardcore fans chanting a love song that could be sent as a personalised Valentine’s video-card. In the run up to Valentine’s Day, media partnerships, editorial seeding and behavioural targeting across football sites and blogs/forums delivered effective reach. YouTube and Google targeted ‘football’ and ‘Valentine’ searches while Facebook Connect amplified social reach. We also took to the streets, handing out Valentine’s cards through Metro distributors. On Valentine’s Day itself we enabled fans to perform their own ‘HardChorus’ at karaoke booths across European stadiums and fed the content to YouTube. Within two weeks the ‘HardChorus’ video was viewed 5 million times, 50,000 v-cards were sent and fans from 121 countries praised it with 3,000 YouTube comments and 700 videos.

Dedicate and send the song at pumahardchourus.com

Advertising Agency: DROGA5, New York
Executive Creative Director: Ted Royer/Duncan Marshall
Creative Director: Neil Heymann
Copywriter: Erik Hogfeldt
Art Director: Petter Hernmarck
Production Company: KNUCKLEHEAD London UNITED KINGDOM
Director:Ben Gregor
Post Production:The Mill

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