Panenka is an independent football magazine with a different approach. Since its birth, the magazine was created with the aim of reporting on important issues in society through the lens of football. Panenka briefed our team to provide a credible, actionable link between their magazine and the environmental climate crisis, resulting in a movement that would generate long term impact with an audience that are traditionally uninterested in the subject.

We worked alongside Panenka to drive awareness and influence environmental action within our target audience, in a manner that meant something to them… through football.

Every 3 seconds the equivalent of 3 football pitches of forest disappears, due to deforestation, forest fires and climate change. This is bad news for our planet and for football lovers, because if you have grown up playing football, you know how important trees are: They have always acted as goalposts. To inspire the global football community to do something about this we created Planting Goals: an initiative to help the future of the planet by planting the goals of the future. The April magazine contained a pack of tree seeds and simple instructions on how to plant a goal. The global football community immediately went wild, planting hundreds of new goalposts around the world.

There was no PR strategy ahead of the proactive idea presented to Panenka Magazine.

The PR elements include press release pointing to the Planting Goals messaging and translated into Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Little seeds were packaged and sent to journalists and influencers to actively participate in planting the goals of the future.

The April issue of the magazine contained a pack of tree seeds and simple instructions on how to plant their goal. The Planting Goals initiative was launched with a video on 21 March, World Tree Day, but went far beyond this specific day and lasted for months. The global football community immediately reacted and embraced the initiative, planting hundreds of new goalposts around the world, with new trees still being planted daily.

The Planting Goals initiative was launched with a video on 21 March, World Tree Day and the global football community immediately reacted and embraced the initiative. With a simple idea, we managed to not only impact over 5 million people but also changed the behaviour of a target audience that otherwise wouldn’t have been moved to plant trees to help the environment. Not only does have we impacted the environment with our direct action of planting hundreds of goalposts around the world, but we also have raised further environmental awareness and action within a notoriously tricky demographic.