Football’s First User Manual

Mercado McCann

Medals Won

🥈 SILVER – Best Use of Design and UX/UI

Campaign Overview

For the eighth consecutive year, YPF relaunched its iconic adidas football promotion—this time with a far greater challenge: redeeming all 600,000 balls in a market saturated with repeated mechanics and declining surprise. The task wasn’t just to sell another football, but to reawaken attention, emotion, and participation around a familiar reward.

The breakthrough came by transforming the football into something never done before: Football’s first user manual. Launched alongside Argentina’s World Champion National Team, the campaign turned a standard redemption into a cultural artifact. The manual extended beyond the ball into multiple formats, multiplying reach and ensuring the campaign lived far beyond physical redemption—ultimately driving the most successful YPF adidas ball campaign to date.

Creative Concept

The idea reimagined the world’s most familiar object—the football—by treating it as something that, for the first time ever, needed to be learned. While every toy comes with instructions, the ball never had any. That contradiction became the creative spark: if you can learn to use a ball, you can become a world champion.

A Manual for the Unwritten Game: The campaign created the world’s first football user manual—an enduring object crafted with the same reverence as football culture itself. More than 50 illustrated rules blended humor, nostalgia, imagination, and technique to teach the fundamentals in a universally accessible way.
Playful Pedagogy: Each illustration turned basic moves into moments of discovery, transforming ordinary gestures into memorable lessons. The tone was warm, emotional, and unmistakably rooted in football’s generational storytelling.
A Cultural Tribute in Print: Designed to be kept, shared, and passed down, the manual honored football’s role as a shared language. It bridged childhood play with professional aspiration, speaking to beginners, fans, and champions alike.

The campaign’s creative execution elevated a simple ball into a cultural artifact—blending instruction, emotion, and imagination to celebrate the sport’s universal magic.

Execution Strategy

Cultural Reframing of a Classic Promotion: Instead of repeating YPF’s long-standing ball exchange mechanic, the strategy transformed it into a participatory cultural platform. The football was no longer a giveaway—it became an object of creativity, belonging, and national identity.

Icon-Led Engagement: With Messi, De Paul, and Scaloni at the center, the manual invited families, kids, and fans to explore the sport together. Their presence elevated the promotion from a transactional incentive to an emotional, communal experience rooted in Argentine football culture.

Redemption Engine for Premium Growth: The manual and ball exchange were tied to Infinia purchases or points-plus-cash, strategically driving premium fuel sales and deepening loyalty program engagement. The combination of storytelling, collectability, and star power converted a routine promotion into a high-impact traffic and engagement driver.

Impact and Results

The campaign delivered remarkable results:

600,000 balls fully redeemed, demonstrating overwhelming nationwide participation and demand.
87% positive sentiment, validating the emotional power and cultural resonance of the idea.
86% brand recall, confirming strong message penetration across audiences.
90%+ awareness among passing drivers, proving the strength of roadside visibility and real-world impact.
94% brand positioning score, reinforcing YPF’s leadership and affinity in the category.
Most successful YPF + adidas ball campaign in nearly a decade, surpassing historical performance benchmarks.
Complete sell-out of the promotion, signaling exceptional consumer engagement and promotional efficiency.

Why It Worked

The campaign succeeded by turning repetition into reinvention. Instead of fighting promotion fatigue, YPF embraced creativity as the differentiator. By designing a physical object that felt collectible, meaningful, and culturally relevant, the campaign transformed redemption into participation.

The manual didn’t just explain football—it celebrated it. It bridged generations, reactivated imagination, and restored wonder to an object everyone thinks they already understand. By anchoring functionality in emotion and national identity, YPF didn’t just move product—it reinforced its role as a culturally embedded brand in Argentine daily life.

Client

YPF

Agency Name