LiquidThread Face to Face with the Arsenal Family

A new campaign from Starcom MediaVest Group’s sports marketing division SPORTS at SMG and their content division LiquidThread has just been released and it's not like the normal footballer-starring spots. 

Promoting Arsenal's partnership with Europcar, the campaign takes a comedic look at fictional relatives of players Jack Wilshire, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Per Mertesacker. Using some clever - and slightly unsettling - visual gimmickry from Neon, and some surprisingly decent performances on-screen from the Arsenal players.

LiquidThread's creative director, Rupert Britton [pictured above] explains the thinking behind the campaign and how it all came together. There's also a making off at the bottom of the page.

Where did the idea for the campaign originate?

We were tasked with creating awareness of Europcar’s partnership with Arsenal FC, which was brokered by our colleagues in SPORTS at SMG, to amplify their ‘Moving Your Way’ message. The partnership gave us limited access to players and yet premiership footballers and rental cars don’t exactly go well together.  

The idea then led us to think about their relatives and how they might use Europcars, which quickly took us into rich comedy territory of ‘fantasy footballer relatives'. Arsenal have done some great work with Paddy Power in the past and the club were absolutely brilliant in allowing us to poke some fun.

It’s an unusual approach for a football-based campaign; was that the whole point?

We knew it wouldn’t be enough just to feature Wilshere, Mertesacker and Oxlade-Chamberlain in the film, we had to do something incredibly unique and surprising to drive organic views to the video.

By lacing the content with a humorous twist, this is the incentive for people to invest time their time to click and view a piece of advertising, particularly from a brand new to the branded entertainment space. Ben Fogg, our writer/director, is a very talented comedy writer and he really brought the characters to life with some great lines and visual gags.

How did you choose the players to focus on?

We wanted a couple of the English lads and we also had a soft spot for World Cup champion Mertesacker. To top it off, who couldn't have asked for a better result at Tuesday night’s England v Scotland game. England’s victory [they won 3-1], where Wilshere assisted Oxlade-Chamberlain, was entirely fortuitous but played in our favour, giving us an even bigger hook to launch the campaign with!

Footballers aren’t generally known for their acting skills so was that an important factor in the choice?

We only had a very limited time with each of the players and so we ensured that our actors shouldered most of the performances and took away that risk. When it came down to it on the day, we were blown away by how good the players were going into character. They really got into it!

The VFX in the spot are almost seamless; was that always the plan?

We originally talked about prosthetics, but it would have been impossible to have done that in the time we had with the players. The VFX team at Neon really pulled it out of the bag in creating three new individuals who are a chimera of our actors and the players.

What was the hardest part of putting the film together?

The hardest part was in capturing the performances of the players in almost laboratory conditions at Arsenal’s training ground with the clock ticking. Everything had to go like clockwork in our allotted time. The meticulous planning that went into the shoot ensured it actually went very smoothly.