PR · Brand campaign · Sport · 2024
Good Life+ × Euro 2024
It's Scot to be England.
Wee Gord's big surprise.
On the eve of Euro 2024, former Scotland midfielder and manager Gordon Strachan sent a good luck message... to England. Cue viral chaos, till he came clean: each time England score, Good Life+ were donating to grassroots football in Scotland. Win-win. Kinda.
The brief
A new free-prize-draw brand. One of football's biggest summers.
Good Life+ is a prize draw subscription, who were looking to make a splash around Euro 2024, reasoning (not unreasonably) that their core audience would be quite invested in the football that summer.
Therefore, the brief was simple: make us noticeable, around the Euros. Amongst a broader campaign of podcast sponsorships, and influencer collabs, this was the tactical, on-budget PR play that generated brand noise before the tournament.
The idea
Get the most respected man in Scottish football to back England.
The mechanic was a free prize-draw with a Euros trip to Germany on the line — flights, tickets, hotel, and £1,000 spending money — and a built-in good cause: every time England scored at the tournament, Good Life+ would donate £1,000 to a fund for Scottish football.
But mechanics on their own don't trend. What trends is a betrayal. So we gave the campaign a Trojan horse: Gordon Strachan — former Celtic and Scotland manager, no less — filmed wishing England the very best, holding a St George's flag, signing off with “it's coming home.”
We launched it without explanation. We let Scotland be furious for forty-eight hours. Then we explained.
The execution
Two films. One 48-hour cliffhanger.
We didn't open the campaign with a press release. We opened it with Strachan, on his own, in front of a camera, in character as a man cheerfully selling out his country.
Act 01 · launch
The treachery.
He's done what..?!
The launch film dropped in the days before the tournament's opening fixture: Scotland vs Germany, the curtain- raiser the Tartan Army had been counting down to. Strachan, though, has other things on his mind: wishing England luck.
The reaction was instant. The Daily Record ran an exclusive. A slew of Scottish football titles followed within hours. Yahoo picked it up nationally. The video racked up thousands of comments as it made its way toward viral infamy.
Act 02 · reveal
The mechanic.
Every English goal, a Scottish gain.
Forty-eight hours in, the second film landed. Same Strachan, same chair, same cheek. For every goal England scored at Euro 2024, Good Life+ would donate £1,000 to a fund for Scottish football. Suddenly the Tartan Army had a rare and faintly demented reason to want England to win: every goal Harry Kane put away was money for the grassroots game at home.
Daily Record covered the reveal the next morning, with the headline doing the work the launch film had set it up to do: this is what Strachan was up to. The comments turned almost overnight from outrage to grudging admiration. The Tartan Army — a fan culture whose entire identity is built on *not* cheering for England — spent the next month doing the maths.
The result
A brand most of Britain hadn't heard of. A campaign most of Scotland had.
The Daily Record covered it twice — once for the launch, once for the reveal — and rode the video on its own Instagram account, where it pulled the kind of numbers a free-prize-draw brand normally has to pay for. Glasgow Live, Aberdeen Live, Yahoo News and a fan ecosystem of Scottish football channels carried it from there.
For a brand whose entire job is to be top-of-mind when a person is deciding whether to enter this month's draw, that is the whole point. A summer's worth of earned media, from a joke which landed on both sides of the border.
What was said
-
"Bizarre moment ex-Scotland boss Gordon Strachan wishes ENGLAND good luck at Euro 2024."
Daily Record -
"Gordon Strachan bizarrely wishes England good luck ahead of Euro 2024."
Yahoo -
"Gordon Strachan's England support at Euro 2024 reason revealed, and it helps Scotland."
Daily Record -
"Former Scotland manager Gordon Strachan reveals why he wants England to score."
Glasgow Live
Credits
- Creative lead
- Lee Price
- Talent
- Gordon Strachan OBE
- Client
- Good Life+
Next case
Save Our Shirt.
Unsponsoring football.