Taking AI and Disruption Gold as well as the Chair Award at The Drum Awards for Marketing EMEA 2024 is Hope Sogni – The 10th Fifa President by Dark Horses. Here is the award-winning case study.
2023 saw women’s football reach astronomical heights, but despite viewership and interest skyrocketing, incidents of misogyny and inequality continued to dominate the headlines. Indeed, the success of the Women’s World Cup was overshadowed by a non-consensual kiss from Luis Rubiales, the head of the Spanish Football Federation, forced upon one of the Spanish female players, Jenni Hermoso, during the medal presentation ceremony.
While the world was rightly shocked, this type of behavior wasn’t new and stood to illustrate in plain sight the systemic abuse women in football endure across the world.
This was just one inequality story in a sea of many. Players across the world spoke of sexual abuse within football. The Jamaican women’s team had to boycott games in response to not being paid. Kit manufacturer Nike initially refused to sell the England Women’s national goalkeeper jersey until a public outcry, despite selling the male equivalent. And the 2034 Men’s World Cup was awarded to Saudi Arabia after sudden deadlines and requirements meant they were the only nation that submitted a bid, effectively handing the competition to a country that oppresses women and the LGBTQ+ community.
Presiding over all of this controversy was Fifa – the international governing body of football.
Its president, Gianni Infantino, had run unopposed at the last two elections and was seen by many as perpetuating posturing, cronyism, and misogyny, making the ‘beautiful game’ decidedly less so.
In its 120-year history, Fifa has had nine presidents, all male, and never even a female candidate in the running. The need for more female representation in key decision-making roles within football’s governing body is vital, but too many women have found themselves shifted from the chosen to the frozen by publicly challenging the leadership in football.
Any women in football with the courage to stand up to the patriarchal status quo have been systematically undermined and sidelined, creating a culture of acquiescence amid fear of reprisals. Key issues such as sexual abuse, unethical practices, financial accountability, and voting reform are given insufficient airtime.
To many, football’s governance is broken.
Objectives
Dark Horses is a creative agency focused on sport, working with numerous rights-holders in women’s sport in particular. As specialists in this space, we see it as our job to be instigators and agitators; to hold the industry to account. This sometimes means going above and beyond paid work for clients. Fed up with the persistent posturing and constant misogyny, we set ourselves the challenge to get both the industry and the public to take notice of the iniquity of the status quo.
History has repeatedly shown us how the power of collective voices can dismantle broken systems built to protect the few.
We wanted to create a stunt that changed how people viewed football governance and to drive an understanding of the necessity for women to be able to get to the top, to affect genuine change.
The solution needed to be able to aggregate the collective voice of women in football from around the world, and disrupt the power structures in a way that hasn’t been possible before, without fear of discrimination or retribution to any individual.
Ultimately, it was only AI that could resolve this. To pave the way for a new cohort of women at the top of football governance, empowered and entitled to say exactly what they think and make the game, in all its forms, better than it has ever been.
Strategy
We created the 10th Fifa President – Hope Sogni – the first female candidate to stand for the position, but more importantly, she stood as the collective voice of women in football from around the world.
Hope was created using AI, with her knowledge and progressive outlook formed exclusively by women. She was built to have an encyclopedic understanding of the sport, its policies, and the key issues it faces while being able to converse in real time.
Taking over 10 months to fully build, Hope was created using thousands of hours of interviews and opinion pieces, and consultation from dozens of prominent women across the world of football, including Moya Dodd (former vice-captain of Australia) and Maggie Murphy (CEO of Lewes FC).
With the ability to speak to Hope in real-time, her presidential campaign was launched with an exclusive interview in the Guardian newspaper. Her hypothetical candidacy was backed up with a presidential manifesto in which Hope highlighted many of the misogynistic and unequal issues that besiege the world of football.
Fans were also able to talk to her in real time and question her policies through an interactive website.
Hope is capable of keynote speeches, responding to real-time incidents and PR interviews, providing sound bites on sensitive topics that might ordinarily damage careers of senior women in football.
Results
Hope’s interview with The Guardian was given a prominent picture on the back page of the newspaper – something that even real female athletes struggle to achieve – as well as a full-page story inside the paper, including imagery of her hypothetical campaign posters.
Within two days, the news of Hope’s Fifa President candidacy had gone global, covered in 42 countries, in multiple languages, across key national titles, including the BBC, The Sun, Marca, Ouest France, Dire, Usbytez, Playmaker Brasil, Gazetta, Italia 24, Time News, the Herald, Der Spiegel, Napolista and Soccer America; and even Fifa inboxes, including Gianni Infantino’s.
It raised an international debate and global engagement around the issue of a lack of senior women in football.
A week later, the campaign had reached a total audience of 364 million, with over 6,200 social engagements. The website hosting Hope’s real-time interaction saw 39,810 page views from numerous countries, leading to 13,800 sessions, 7,600 users, and a 4.4-minute average session duration.
Since the launch, we have been contacted by organizations like the Malala Fund, who want to utilize Hope to help shine a light on the plight of the Afghanistan Women’s Football team, which Fifa will no longer recognize since the Taliban took charge.
This is where the real power of the idea lies – Hope holding FIFA to account and affecting real change for women whose voices are not being listened to.
We are in conversations with the National Football Museum to create a physical exhibition for Hope so that members of the public can interact with her and learn about her views on football governance. A museum that is dominated with content about men and the men’s game, displaying Hope as a symbol of how the future of football could be brighter, couldn’t be more exciting and disruptive.
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