Heads Up: ⚽︎○⚬ ✧
When your nation is disappearing, even a football jersey can become a protest.
The Brief:
The Marshall Islands is the only UN member state without an officially recognised national football team. Despite having players, a federation, and a stadium, the process of gaining international recognition has been slow. Compounding this challenge, rising sea levels threaten to erase the nation before its team can play an official match.
The Campaign:
To draw attention to this dual crisis, the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation (MISF) launched the “No-Home Jersey.”
The jersey features indigenous symbols like the outrigger canoe, Plumeria flower, and Great White Shark, and the slogan “We deserve to thrive”. The most exciting part of this campaign for me, is that in a powerful visual metaphor, the jersey was presented in a campaign where it gradually disappeared piece by piece, mirroring the gradual loss of the Marshall Islands due to climate change.
As the campaign developed, they continued to share promotional shots where more and more of the shirt had disappeared. Genius.
Why does it stand out?
✅ Visual Metaphor: The disappearing jersey serves as a poignant symbol of the nation’s vulnerability to climate change.
✅ Cultural Significance: Incorporating indigenous symbols and messages grounds the campaign in the nation’s identity.
✅ Innovative Awareness: Transforming a sports jersey into a storytelling device brings global attention to a pressing issue.
What can we learn from this?
This campaign reminds us that sometimes the most powerful way to communicate systemic harm is not with shock or statistics, but with symbolism and slowness. A football jersey — usually a symbol of identity and belonging — is here used to represent disappearance. That pacing mirrors how suffering and destruction play out in industrial farming — quietly, steadily, invisibly.
By flipping familiar symbols and showing harm as something ongoing and preventable — rather than distant or already done — we can move people from detached awareness to engaged discomfort. The message doesn’t need to be louder. It needs to be closer. And it needs to linger.
Heads Up Challenge: You’re going to create a campaign that slowly evolves from one thing to another to reveal a truth. What is it?
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
Your Brief:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team
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Open call: We’d like to extend an open call for guest writers to Heads Up. We’re particularly keen to capture great work from wider than our own global west lens. Have you seen some great ads or tactics that would make for an interesting Heads Up edition? We’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got an idea, get in touch at hello@campaignslab.org