Lager brand Carlsberg has shown its support for the unsung heroes of walking football by packing out a grassroots club ground as part of its latest brand positioning. Watch here.

The beer maker’s senior brand manager, Jessica Stacey, says her aim is to “build emotional connections that go beyond functional messaging, especially in today’s cluttered media landscape.”

Working with its longstanding agency Fold7, the Walking Football film sees Carlsberg surprise a local club in Liverpool with an elite football fan experience flooding the ground with fans and roping in Liverpool FC players David James and Gemma Bonner.



The minute-and-a-half film shows the stadium fill with supporters cheering, waving flags and brandishing a poster of the team’s chairman.

Chhaya Kapila, strategy director at Fold7, says Carlsberg campaigns are always “full of personality and make you smile”.

It is this feeling she wanted to convey in the agency’s latest project with the beer-maker. To make this happen, Kapila says the casting process was essential to find some real “characters who would be fun to surprise on film.”

In the pre-production phase, Fold7 discovered the Liverpool FC-supporting walking football team St Helens. It then worked closely with the team’s chairman to understand what a typical game looks like at the club. “Once we knew what the day-to-day looked like we could figure out how to bring ‘the best’ of match day atmosphere to them,” Kapila explains.

Carlsberg is primarily working with Meta for the campaign amplification through its Storyteller tool, to “deliver sequential targeting,” Stacey explains. The aim of the media plan is to get people to first watch the ad, then the supporting social clips, after that physical assets that are walking football branded followed by ads that drive people to buy a Carlsberg. “The hope is that this will connect consumers to each stage of the marketing funnel and be a more effective way of using social media,” Stacey explains.

The campaign is part of Carlsberg’s latest brand positioning: ‘Carlsberg exists to help more people access more of the best’. The first iteration of this fresh positioning was its Fare Game campaign which brought taxi drivers together in their cars to watch a game of football. It was born out of the insight that most taxi drivers miss big games due to working unsociable hours.

Stacey says it’s “deliberately ambitious” to “enable the brand to stretch across social, digital, and major above-the-line activations.”

Credit: The Drum

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