Brief: Raise awareness of suicide and methods of prevention amongst young male football fans.
Role: Creative conception.
Deliverables: 3 feature documentaries on YouTube, with cross-platform support across social.
Roughly every 90 minutes a man under the age of 45 takes their life in the UK. That's one for every game of football you've ever watched. Despite this, men - particularly of the 'football fan' archetype - struggle to open up about how they really feel. Fans could sit next to someone at the ground who seems perfectly happy week in, week out, only to one day arrive at the stadium to be greeted by an empty seat. Yet it's the simple act of opening up and having a frank conversation about suicide that Maytree believes can stop these tragedies happening.
Working with Maytree as COPA90, we had a unique opportunity to spark a conversation amongst a predominantly young male football audience. We did this three ways:
- Firstly, by hijacking regular editorial content. "Top X" films are a mainstay of COPA editorial. We created "6 Most Depressing Clubs To Support", with a seemingly glib run-down of the most miserable English football clubs. Instead of a number one, we delivered the message that football isn't a matter of life and death, but depression can be. With more than half a million views, 10,000 likes and 2,000 comments, the video well outperformed regular COPA90 content with only a very modest media budget. In total we delivered nearly 3 million views across Facebook and YouTube.
- We then addressed suicide in football head-on with a feature on Leon McKenzie, a journeyman English forward-turned-boxer, who despite seeming like the archetypal British hard-man, dealt with extreme depression and attempted suicide multiple times.
- Lastly, we spoke to 3 football supporters who had lost fellow fans - their friends and family - to suicide. This included Man United influencer Adam McKola, someone the COPA90 audience is very familiar with but in a completely different context. The video received well over 100,000 views and some of the most universally positive and heart-warming comments on any piece of content the channel has released, with the message clearly landing that talking about suicide is the simplest away to help stop it.
Press:
http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/18/sport/football-suicide-blue-monday-leon-mckenzie/index.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/soccer/maytree-fan-stories/vp-AAuNIwL
