How Snickers and Digitas organised the longest football game ever

As of 3 June 2010, Snickers holds the Guinness World Record for the longest football match in the world. How did this come about? It started when digital agency Digitas London was set a brief to associate the brand with football in the Middle East.

Objectives

It is well known that young men like to brag and show-off their sporting skills. Snickers is recognised as an energy bar, so it seemed logical to tie the two together in a real-life event: the world's longest football match to last for a day and a half in Qatar, that youths in different Arab countries could take part in.

This was a particularly apt event for Snickers, as the brand has been always associated with football. One of Snickers’ main aims was to challenge and unleash football potential and create a tremendous amount of excitement among Arab youth in the region. The participating countries in this activity were Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco.

Strategy

The recruitment drive had digital at its heart, but because the desire to brag about taking part in this event was so much of a pull, the idea became explosive socially with TV news, radio stations, web and newspapers. This drove more interest and inspired more wannabe participants.

To meet the demand to take part, there was a six-week fitness programme to whittle down 13,000 hopefuls to just two squads of 18 very fit players. The social side took a life of its own with pre-, during and post-event messages of support which were relayed to the players.

Results

The world record was broken. Guinness World Records adjudicated and granted a new world record for the longest football match, set at 42 hours and 5 minutes.

What began as a digital brief, resulted in one TV station creating a short documentary about the event. Usually, TV advertising fills the spaces between programmes, but in this instance, a programme was created around an advertising idea.

Final results for the campaign are still be collated, but at least two million people have been exposed to the campaign. Calculations are that the noise generated $2.5 million-worth of free advertising. Also, some players have now become mini celebrities with media like Virgin Radio interviewing them.