Women make up almost 50% of all athletes. Yet, they receive only receive 4% of all sports media coverage. This lack of exposure has led to inequality towards the recognition and acknowledgement of female athletes as compared to their male counterparts.

Because adidas is a firm believer in equal opportunities, we decided to celebrate women in the midst of the world’s biggest male-dominated sports event – the FIFA World Cup – with the objective of empowering female football players and giving them more visibility during a time when all eyes are on football’s male players.

During the peak of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, we created three empty 121x95 ft murals in the sand located between Doha’s two airports on Doha Beach, within walking distance of Stadium 974 to speak to football fans who were in Doha to attend the World Cup and those who were following the event online.

We then asked our social following to guess who the next adidas legends will be on our Instagram handles. As expected, fans flooded the pages with the names of popular players – all of whom were men. On the day of reveal, people saw that the legends were in fact Mary Fowler, Farah Jefry, and Catarina Macario. A twist that turned the world’s attention to our female athletes from 3,000 ft in the air – ensuring that adidas’ female legends were the first thing football fans saw upon landing in Qatar.

adidas are proud sponsors of the FIFA World Cup. But they’re also sponsors of the Women’s World Cup too. This is a half of the game that goes unnoticed.

We believe it deserved the same type of coverage and excitement, so we came up with a strategy to put the spotlight on the Women’s World Cup in the most disruptive ways possible.

And what better place to do this than on one of the biggest stages in the world, Doha.

We knew everyone would be tuning into anything related to the male stars, so we took that energy and used it to redirect fans to something different.

We created a positive bait-and-switch initiative that primed people to expect one thing which was replaced with something entirely different. And when all eyes were on the capital we took the opportunity to reveal something that wasn’t expected.

Record-breaking sand artist Nathan Alapide was commissioned to bring the legends to life for viewers with a team of 20 people who worked against unpredictable wind conditions while thousands of World Cup attendees were roaming the vicinity.

During the construction of the murals, we took to social media to ask our followers who they think will be the legends that deserve a spot on the 121 x 95 ft murals to trigger the response we were anticipating – a number of famous male players.

To successfully put adidas’ female players in the spotlight, the murals were strategically placed next to the 2022 FIFA World Cup’s most talked-about stadium and near both airports for maximum visibility.

The stunt was designed to give our female football players visibility and the results speak for themselves.

We managed to reach 15 million people on social media which led to a 149% increase in online conversations related to the Women’s World Cup. We aimed for 100%, so this definitely exceeded our expectations. What’s more, we created a real interest in the competition increasing site visits to FIFA’s Women’s World Cup tournament website by 67%. We set out to raise awareness and engagement however, the big success was the perceptual change we created: the stunt increased positive association and comments related to the tournament by 15%.

At a time when everyone was focused on male footballers and their achievements, we made icons of the women players.