Hannah Waddingham could also be extra of a rugby fan in actual life, however the Emmy-winning actress has been inextricably linked to soccer since her C-suite days within the beloved comedy Ted Lasso.
Benefiting from that place within the public consciousness, Waddingham and Johnnie Walker have partnered for a marketing campaign to rally viewers across the 2023 FIFA Ladies’s World Cup.
This system—which has content material, merchandise and experiential activations—will middle on “Match Day Memos” from Waddingham that give video tune-in reminders. The messages, delivered by textual content, embody stats and information on how watching ladies’s sports activities might help stage an uneven taking part in area for feminine athletes.
Although ladies make up 40% of all athletes, they obtain lower than 10% of whole sports activities information protection, per the marketing campaign’s knowledge.
“We should do higher to ensure ladies obtain the identical visibility, recognition and correct portrayals as their male counterparts,” Waddingham says in an intro video dropping right now.
Apart from the dearly departed Ted Lasso, Waddingham’s sports activities bona fides prolong to the Tremendous Bowl, the place she made her game-day debut as a glamorous James Bond-style villain in a Rakuten industrial final 12 months.
For the initiative dubbed “Watch Ladies’s Sports activities,” Waddingham asks shoppers to “demand extra consideration, extra information protection, extra assets and extra respect for girls athletes.”
The message of the initiative is easy, but its architects hope it will possibly have a broad, probably international affect.
“When folks tune in, all boats rise,” Sophie Kelly, senior vp of whiskies at Johnnie Walker’s mum or dad firm Diageo North America, informed Adweek. “Extra eyeballs means extra manufacturers, extra sponsorship cash, higher cost for athletes.”
Leaders on the Ladies’s Sports activities Basis, a nonprofit accomplice in this system, mentioned it’s crucial to have company backing to assist shut the visibility hole and transfer towards gender fairness.
“As hundreds of thousands tune in to the Ladies’s World Cup, it’s our hope that this marketing campaign evokes everybody to proceed following ladies athletes in all sports activities all year long and encourages them to uplift all ladies of their communities to allow them to thrive on and off the sphere,” Danette Leighton, the group’s CEO, mentioned in an announcement.
Past lego-slapping
“Watch Ladies’s Sports activities” is a part of Johnnie Walker’s ongoing involvement in skilled ladies’s soccer—the model sponsors Angel Metropolis Soccer Membership in Los Angeles and the New Jersey/New York Gotham FC–aiming to take its relationships past typical logo-slapping.
