For the world cup 2014, for our client Piraeus Bank - Golden Sponsor of the Greek National Team, we created a campaign with the slogan ‘’Greece By your side’’. To serve this campaign we created a fictional football player called Manos Sergios, which was called by the National teams’ manager, Fernando Santos, to join the team as the 24th player of a National team ever, live at the preselection press conference. The news of his announcement caused surprise and raised questions of who was this mystery player and started to spread across all media! In just a few hours everyone in Greece was talking about Manos Sergios. Every thought he was a real player. All of this though lasted 33 hours as the next night after his announcement by Fernando Santos, the tv ad of the campaign was released, in which the true identity of Manos Sergios was revealed.

In just 33 hours until the true identity of Manos Sergios was revealed the were:

• 225 articles at sites and blogs

• 2450 shares and thousands of comments about him

• 110.000 views of Fernando Santos’ interview

• 39.000 views of Giovanni Silva de Oliveiras’ video

• Dozens of mentions on TV and radio news

After the reveal:

• Approximately 1.000.000 views of the tv ad on Youtube.

• Even Nike agreed in Manos Sergios Promoting the new Nike Magista boots just like real football players did.

The earned media from the whole campaign was over €400.000

Even after the reveal many people still believed that Manos Sergios was a real football player.