This paper tells the story of a unique social campaign created for the Spanish football magazine: Libero.

As an independent, new player in the market, and with limited funds, we outplayed the competition in two ways:

1. By selling the Libero brand rather than this week’s issue, i.e. investing in brand advertising rather than in the tactical, content-led approach favoured by our competitors. We utilized football as a prism for a view on life, with its colloquial language, idioms and metaphors, and explained life through football via the voices of women - ‘If they explain it to you with football, you understand’.

2. By developing compelling online video content to be magnified through social media, rather than the traditional, non-social media used by our competitors. This enabled us not only to target our Spanish home market, but also enabled Libero to reach and engage like-minded people worldwide, something impossible to do on our budget using non-social media.

We scored a blinder … with significant social media interaction and circulation growth. Here’s how the beautiful game unfolded…