The Brief for Etihad and Manchester
Manchester City FC and Etihad Airways needed content that celebrated the ten-year anniversary of their commercial relationship and personified their shared values of excellence and global citizenship. The content also needed to be deliverable in multiple outputs throughout the football season.
For Etihad Airways, we needed to showcase their world-class service, position them as the brand of ‘choosing well’, whilst promoting Abu Dhabi and the array of global destinations accessible from there with the airline.
Manchester City’s aim was to leverage its global appeal by incorporating their footballing superstars as naturally as possible.
Our challenge was to create content that was centred around Manchester City and Etihad’s seemingly disparate businesses in an exciting and engaging way.
Our Approach
Freestyle football became the best way to take football out of the stadium and around the world, with a premium aesthetic achieved by incorporating stunning Etihad Airways destinations into expertly designed freestyle football challenges. We incorporated the Manchester City players by allowing them to design each freestyle trial at the beginning of each episode.
Additionally, we created ’destination guides’, which were individual pieces of content showcasing each episode’s destination. For each guide, the Etihad Airways cabin crew presented the location, explaining what made it so special.
The scale of each challenge was extremely ambitious, with elaborate set designs for each challenge built in a total of seven countries across the series.
To ensure consistency in tone and style, the entire tour had a core team of a director, producer, director of photography and production assistant, as well as a local team for each location.
The Freestyle World Tour has become the most successful campaign launched by Manchester City and Etihad as a partnership by both brief fulfilment and KPIs, released across social media platforms as well as both Etihad Airways and Manchester City’s Youtube pages.
Immersing the challenges in the cultural fabric of each city around the world and showcasing the freestylers’ show-stopping skills personified the values of excellence and global citizenship.
Manchester City’s channels has amassed on average 4,646,827 views and 159,499 engagements each episode, and a total of over 29 million views. Across influencer channels the series has received 1,173,145 views and 145,423 engagements.
On Etihad’s channels the total view count has surpassed 5.5 million views and engagements.
