The primary creative challenge was devising a campaign that would reflect Etihad Airways and Manchester City’s shared values and also incorporate their distinct businesses. With one being a luxurious airline company and the other a world-leading football club, embracing their commonalities, as well as differences, would necessitate original thought and creative acumen.

The Freestyle World Tour was our solution. A campaign that took football out of the stadium and around the world. This unique challenge would pitch the world’s best freestyle footballers against one another, in a winner-stays-on series.

Our suggested football competition would travel through six major Etihad Airways destinations, blending together the best elements of travel and sport. The challenges helped show off the cultural fabric of each city and showcased the freestylers’ skills, personifying Etihad and Manchester City’s joint values of global citizenship and excellence.

Freestyle football became the best way to take football out of the stadium and around the world, with a premium aesthetic achieved by incorporating stunning Etihad Airways destinations into expertly designed freestyle football challenges.

We tied in the Manchester City players by allowing them to design the freestyle trial at the beginning of each episode. We also created additional destination guides – individual pieces of content showcasing each episode’s destination.

For each destination guide, Etihad Airways cabin crew presented the location, explaining what made it so special. At the end of each episode, the winner of the challenge got to choose the next destination of the competition, incorporating our brand promise of empowering our guests to “choose well”. As such, the destinations themselves became part of the prize, reinforcing Etihad Airways and Manchester City’s global outlook.

Each challenge was held in one of six major Etihad Airways destinations around the world. Every piece of hero content was accompanied by a destination guide showcasing the city and a suite of social media content posted on the freestylers’ personal accounts, designed to drive traffic towards the hero film.

The competition aspect involved designing a unique freestyle challenge that incorporated a key selling point of the destination; whether it be showcasing one of the city’s most iconic spots or uncovering one of its hidden gems. Each challenge was introduced by a Manchester City player who would perform a demonstration of the rules as well as appear in trick shot challenge videos. Etihad cabin crew also formed a central part of each episode – acting in part as officiators in the competition and also as authorities on each destination – with destination guides being narrated from their perspective.

For Etihad, the campaign needed to showcase our world-class service and incorporate our brand promise of ‘choosing well’, as well as promote Abu Dhabi and the global destinations guests can travel to with the airline.

From Manchester City’s perspective, the campaign needed to feel at home on their social media pages and appeal to their global football fan-base.

The creative also needed to incorporate their football stars as much and as naturally as possible, despite limited and infrequent player access (three separate one hour filming opportunities with the players at their Manchester training facility).

The campaign was to be distributed across all online and social platforms of both Etihad and Manchester City, including some travel-orientated deliverables made to suit Etihad’s in-flight entertainment platform.

The campaign was the most successful content campaign ever launched by Etihad and Manchester City as a partnership, generating 35.2 million views to date.

The series had an average watch rate of 66% on Manchester City’s YouTube channel compared with a club benchmark of 38%. The secondary content, the destination guide films, also performed extremely well with completion rates of 42% – well above expectations.

Engagement rates were at 11% which was also higher than the club’s benchmark of 8%. Etihad and Manchester City’s test group analysis on the impact of the Freestyle World Tour showed that 67% of the exposed group gave positive agree responses to all of the brand statements, all of which centred around Etihad’s new brand promise, “choose well”.

Furthermore, 97% from the same test group agreed to the statement “Etihad Airways is an airline that represents my values”, providing a resounding endorsement for the content