Bologna births a truly bonny idea

Macron and Bologna FC have partnered with the local government to gift every baby born in the city a free jersey starting this year, aiming to build fans from day one (on earth). SHOOK’s co-founder Gemma Moroney reports.

I saw this new campaign on Instagram this week and absolutely loved the generosity.

Forget ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’. This is ‘because we could, we should’.

In a sport sometimes accused of being greedy or not caring about real fans, this is a lovely, generous gesture. With only one club in the city, it’s also pretty much guaranteed to please everyone.

Perfect for column inches and conversations, it’s exactly what ‘Would people talk about it in the pub?’ - or rather bar - means. And it harks back to a few fine creative traditions:

Alt marketing

From using pigeons to advertise Acclaim’s Virtua Tennis 2 to advertising Shadowman on gravestones (both Frank’s handiwork), this is a, wonderfully effective, well-trodden path. In this case, babies are the medium.

Birthrights

Using birth to deliver creative goods. IKEA is my favourite exponent of this, having done a spin on ‘free cots’ nine months after Valentine’s Day a few times and even publishing an ad for cots in Sweden that doubled as a pregnancy test. I’m sure that about eight years ago there was also a stunt by a football club encouraging fans to populate the new generation of fans, but I can’t find the evidence.

Giving it away

‘Free’ isn’t just a winner for Marc Bosman—free sells. It gets headlines, gets people moving and gets them talking. It might not be clever (unless it’s paired with some of the beautiful Bolognaise thinking above) but it does work.

What’s more, this move by Bologna is a cracking way to launch a new shirt. Long gone are the days of a player awkwardly holding a questionable new jersey but this also avoids the now obligatory spoof film/fashion/musician collab.

Finally, and the biggest reason I like this idea, it doesn’t take its fans’ loyalty for granted. In a one-club city (Newcastle for example), you can expect a constant flow of fans, with allegiance handed down from parent to child.

Bologna could not do this campaign at all and fully expect this generation to support the club anyway. But they didn’t. Great brands celebrate and give back to the people who make them a success (see LEGO and AFOLS or Gaga and her Little Monsters or Taylor and her Swifties).

The club and Macron have now created a wonderfully weird world where every birth announcement in Bologna will be an advertisement for the new strip. Imagine! The arrival posts on social, the little thank you cards with a picture, the bedroom with the little framed shirt when they’ve outgrown it, and the lifelong feeling of goodwill.

Plus, even if all that gets too normal to comment on, the exceptions to the rule (Modena?!) will spark the conversation all over again.

Molto buono!