In the wake of the 2018 World Cup, Nike Football set out to launch a new boot: the PhantomVSN. As young footballers around the world prepared for their upcoming season, we wanted to make this boot the must-have for the pitch.

We know that word of mouth and athlete endorsements are much more powerful than just pure brand messages. So we decided to leverage our core athletes and footballing audience to help us spread the message of this new boot and its benefits - all to make PhantomVSN the biggest selling premium boot of the season.

To launch Nike’s new PhantomVSN football boot we unleashed a mysterious character called The Phantom - a demonic football freak capable of wreaking havoc on all those who cross its path. Every asset spread dark and mysterious rumours among footballers everywhere, leaving everyone wondering WHO or WHAT The Phantom was…

To reach our core young footballer audience, we honed in on two of their key behaviours to leverage: 1) their high usage of Instagram and propensity to follow their favourite athletes on the platform and 2) their habit of using messaging platforms like Whatsapp to communicate and share content directly with their friends.

Through platform research, we also discovered that Whatsapp had recently launched an Android-only Small Business App with new features - including the ability to set up a business profile and an Auto-Reply feature which would respond to all messages from new contacts with a single, automated message.

Armed with these consumer and media platform insights, we designed our strategy: Use the authenticity and reach of Nike athletes on Instagram (150MM+ combined followers) to drive to a Whatsapp experience where young footballers could discover our film first.

To execute, all we needed was a SIM card and an Android phone and The Phantom account was up and running on the Whatsapp platform within 5-minutes. The only media planning required was coordinating the timing of Nike athlete posts on Instagram Stories to leak this number to the world.

24-hours before our film went public, we used top footballers’ Instagram Stories to “leak” the film to their millions of followers. Those with a sharp-eye were drawn to a "secret" phone number and a hint to hit it up on WhatsApp. The number connected followers to a mysterious Phantom WhatsApp account that sent out a cryptic welcome message and leaked a link to the un-released film. The stories were live for a 24 hour period, so fans had to act fast if they wanted to see it first and earn bragging rights by sharing it before the “official” launch.

In the first 24-hours, The Phantom contact received messages from 6k unique contacts on Whatsapp and drove 30k views of the campaign’s hero film on YouTube. This indicates that recipients of the film link shared it with an estimated 5x friends or re-watched it repeatedly, marking significant engagement with our content - and giving the film viral buzz and momentum before going public on Nike platforms and in paid media.

Over the 72-hours The Phantom Whatsapp account remained active, it received 80k chat message and over 10k video and voice calls. The Phantom was also added to multiple football-oriented group chats, adding Nike’s voice to their dark social conversations.