Despite women’s sports trending upward, research girls’ participation in sport plunges after age 14, with double the dropout rate compared to boys.

Yet, an Ernst&Young survey showed 94% of females in C-suite positions played sport in their teens, emphasising how sport cultivates life skills like teamwork, resilience and leadership, setting them up for success off the pitch

One of Standard Chartered’s key pillars is ‘Lifting Participation’. Countless brands look to sponsor girls in sport, but our unique role is to empower girls in life through sport.

Our mission: Raise awareness and spotlight the importance of sport among girls, parents, and key stakeholders. More importantly, effect positive change by developing on-ground programmes anchored in expertise.

Play On is a campaign platform empowering girls to stay in sport by dramatising the barriers as to why girls drop out and celebrating the benefits of staying in sport.

We shocked the world through a disruptive stunt in which the LFC Men's team announced that they were quitting football in a post-match interview, giving the same shocking reasons why girls quite - body image, confidence, lack of support.

We then motivated a group of girls to stay in sport with a motivational speech for LFC's manager Jurgen Klopp and then a Q&A with the girls digger deeper into why the stop sport.

We then flew LFC coaches around the world to teach football coaches in key markets how to keep girls in sport - teaching them a curriculum of how to tackle these barriers on and off the pitch.

Traditional football fans have historically not been allies of the women’s game due to long-standing misconceptions and stereotypes.

But as the highest participation and viewed sport on the planet, the football audience are the world’s biggest fan-base and cohort of allies if engaged effectively.

To awaken them to the simple realities leading to girls dropping out of sport, we had to talk to them through a vernacular that they understood; the men’s game.

That’s why we shocked them through a piece of disruptive content featuring Liverpool’s men’s team ‘quitting’ citing the same reasons girls drop out of sport.

The content ran on Liverpool FCs social pages to their 250M+ global audience – a platform that is usually all about football and doesn’t service any partner content. This instantly connected with the global audience raising awareness overnight.

‘Play On’ exceeded both SC’s and LFC’s expectations. It created a cut-through moment, snowballing into a cultural movement led by both partners.

With a media spend under $150,000, the campaign achieved over 150 million impressions, 70 millions completed video views and high social engagements (with ‘I Quit’ and ‘Team Talk’ leading the charge at 66.6% and 77.7% respectively, both meant to surprise unsuspecting audiences).

The campaign was voted as one of Adforum’s top 5 marketing campaigns globally.

‘I Quit’ was SC CEO Bill Winter’s top performing post on his LinkedIn with an earned media value of $20,262 – achieving 12x more reports than his second-best performing content in 2023. It also featured in ITV’s prime-time ‘This Morning’ show reaching an estimated 800,000 television viewers.