The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2023
Águila's TransfHERmarkt puts women's soccer stats into Transfermarkt-style banner ads
The leading soccer-data site showed nothing for female players, so Águila ran banner ads styled as its pages, packed with women's statistics.
Cerveza Águila (Bavaria Colombia, AB InBev)
What it had to solve
Transfermarkt is the leading source of soccer data for recruiters, coaches and everyone involved in the sport, yet a search for female players returned no information. Cerveza Águila, main sponsor of Colombian soccer, wanted to fix one of the biggest problems in women's soccer: the invisibility of its statistics.
How it works
Transfermarkt is the leading source of soccer data for recruiters, coaches and anyone involved in the sport, but a search for female players returned nothing. Women's soccer statistics, the information scouts and fans needed most, simply did not appear.
Cerveza Águila, main sponsor of Colombian soccer, treated the omission as a fixable problem. Instead of asking the platform to add women's data, it 'hacked' Transfermarkt: it created banner ads built to look exactly like the platform's own interface, each one filled with the statistics of female players.
The device put the missing information in the visual language of the site that lacked it, so the ads read as the data pages Transfermarkt should have had. The campaign is preserved in D&AD's Digital Marketing archive; the page records no reach or behaviour figures.
Why it lands
- The idea fixed the gap at the point of use: people searching Transfermarkt met the women's stats inside an interface they already trusted.
- Borrowing the platform's own visual language made the omission concrete — the ads looked like the very pages that were missing.
- It made a structural gap visible without needing the platform's cooperation, because the advertising itself carried the absent data.
- It tied the sponsor's purpose to the sport's real problem: Águila used its position in Colombian soccer to attack the invisibility of women's statistics.
What it did
The banners placed women's statistics inside the exact visual world that had excluded them, making the data gap visible in the medium scouts and fans already used; the work is preserved in D&AD's Digital Marketing archive, which records no reach figures.
What you can take
When the reference platform for a field ignores a group, don't wait for it to change: put the missing data in front of its users wearing the platform's own interface.
Since then
The work sits in D&AD's Digital Marketing archive, and the page records no reach figures, so the lasting artifact is the device itself: women's statistics presented in the interface language of the platform that omitted them. It stands as an example of fixing a data gap from outside the system rather than waiting for the platform to act.
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