Tasked with owning a share of the conversation during the biggest sporting event of the year, the World Cup, for Specsavers, when they were not an official sponsor was an exciting challenge.

Bad lookalikes is a running joke in the footballing community and beyond, specifically online, one that @Specsavers often gets tagged in.

We couldn’t sponsor or mention the real England team, so we created our own.

Playing on the iconic ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’ line, we created our very own Eng-errrrland team, made up entirely of questionable footballing lookalikes from across the UK

We positioned them as “The Specsavers Second Squads: Remove glasses for best results,” unveiling them to the world alongside the real England squad.

The campaign was split into three distinct phases:

1. Scouting for our lookalikes
   The call out, the scouting phase, encouraged our audience to comment with their friend ‘lookalikes’ and share the joke, helping further seed the campaign.

   As well as distributing content via our owned channels TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, we partnered with Ladbible to seed the content to a wider pop culture audience.

2. Unveiling the Specsavers Second Squad
   On the day Southgate announced his official England squad, we launched our Specsavers Second Squad to the world, ensuring it was hyper-relevant to the wider conversation.

3. In-play tournament content

Now our Second Squads were revealed, we used our bank of content to react to goings-on in the games, matching up our lookalikes with the real players dominating conversations on social media. This, paired with our award winning creative reactive approach, was a powerful combination, resulting in us leading the conversation and “ratioing” high profile figures like Piers Morgan.

After seeing the reception to our lookalikes on social media, we wanted to take it further – and splashed their very familiar faces across 13 billboards nationwide.