Christmas is for football…
Christmas in the UK is the time of year where we celebrate our best qualities…giving, goodwill and getting together with friends and family. And in recent years brands have been pretty generous with the Christmas spirit. The commercial airwaves are packed full of touching moments of festive feeling. It’s heart-warming stuff, but it’s also just one part of the experience. We saw an opportunity to do something different with the last year’s Sky Sports Football campaign. To represent Christmas the way it really is for our audience, rather than the idealised way than it’s shown to be. A real, truthful and relatable version of Christmas that connects Sky Sports with the football fan.
And the reality is while the rest of the world 'puts its feet up' over the holidays, the footballing world works harder than ever. Everyone connected to the game - players, fans, staff - dedicate their holidays to the game they love. Sky Sports shows 50 live games from mid-December to mid-January. With more games and more points available than at any other period in the season, success and failure can depend on how teams navigate this critical time of the playing calendar. Fans, meanwhile, have the arduous task of navigating this critical time of year while continuing to be an active part of the family. Which is why we made a playful Christmas ad that reminds fans what Christmas is really all about…Football.
The idea celebrates fans coming together and enjoying football at Christmas, with a twist. The ad, starring Harry Kane, plays on taking familiar festive traditions and observes the unique way that footballers and football fans express them. It’s Christmas, it’s traditional, but it’s definitely not a traditional Christmas. We wanted to draw a symbolic parallel between the established traditions of the festive period - coming together, time with family and friends, the inevitable Christmas travelling, Christmas dinner - and the elements that make up a football fan's match day experience – whether they are attending the live game or watching it at home or in the pub. All of this we sprinkled with some sarcasm, some humour and some sentiment and set it to the backdrop of a traditional rendition of Little Drummer Boy. We wanted to create a unique perspective on a very familiar time of year.
Post Production work was executed by Coffee & TV, who for the final scenes, expertly reconstructed Tottenham’s temporary Wembley Stadium home in CGI and comped Harry Kane and his teammates onto the pitch for a dramatic penalty moment.
To bring this idea to life, the spot was not only written but also directed by the creative team from Sky Creative Agency, who filmed on a range of formats at over 20 different football matches with supporter groups from a variety of leagues including the Premier League, English Football League and Scottish Premier League. The length and the breadth of the country was covered to ensure the full range of fans and teams were included in the film. Everyone involved in the production are passionate, lifelong football fans. This resulted in the spot truly capturing the real, authentic, fan’s eye view of the highs and lows of following your team at the most magical time of the year.