BBDO Dublin won a Bronze award for its powerful “Level the Playing Field” campaign which the agency created for Lidl and its sponsorship of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA).
The Clios were held in New York last week and the agency picked up the award in the sports category. The aim of the campaign was to highlight the fact that the battle to level the playing field in sport is an ongoing one. It also acknowledges the generations of players who have battled for equality and is a rallying cry for all present and future players.
Lidl Ireland has been a major sponsor of the LGFA since 2015 and has invested more than €4m into the partnership. According to research carried out on behalf of Lidl Ireland in 20201, 85% of LGFA female members recognise the uplift in support over the last four years, specifically in the media and among the general public. The research also found that 51% of females claim that they are currently participating in sport, an increase from 2017. However, 31% of girls who used to participate in sports stated they stopped playing in primary school with over a third claiming the reason for this was because their friends were not playing.
According to Sinead Lee, a director of BBDO Dublin and account lead: “It’s the most wonderful news! We are absolutely delighted not just for ourselves but importantly for our client, Lidl. We wanted to create something that really dramatised the challenges that LGFA players face and the mountain metaphor that writer Des Kavanagh and art Director, Rob Murray based the concept around, does that in a visually powerful way. What makes this win even more significant is that the Covid-19 lockdown was put in place at the time we had completed filming so we had to wait over a year to bring it to fruition on screen and print. We are so proud that this creative work has been recognised and how it resonates on such an international scale.”
The campaign was art directed by Rob Murray, and copywritten by Des Kavanagh. “We had always wanted to shoot the film for real, to capture the visceral nature of the ongoing struggle to level the playing field, a CGI representation of the game held no appeal for us,” says Kavanagh. “The Glendalough (Co. Wicklow) location that Red Rage, our production partners, provided, worked perfectly. The hill was incredibly steep and the surrounding landscape was incredibly dramatic. This allowed us to not only portray the intense effort involved in fighting inequality but also to show how necessary and beautiful the end goal of equality is, for all the women and players involved. It was the perfect physical and metaphorical space,” he adds.
