ABOUT

Wake-up

We were tasked with creating a brand identity and accompanying website for Against the Odds, a campaign aiming to spark a movement across all levels of the sporting pyramid in Greater Manchester in support of phasing out gambling sponsorship and advertising in sport.

Around 1 in 15 Greater Manchester residents have been directly or indirectly harmed by gambling, and the promotion of gambling products through sport plays a significant role in normalising gambling and increasing harms.

To ensure that the campaign would resonate with sports clubs and sports bettors, but also avoid any triggers for those harmed by gambling, we engaged with several different stakeholders through the concept creation process, and their input influenced our creative decisions. Healthy Stadia and Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) helped us gather attendees, representing a local lived experience group, a counselling charity as well as key sports organisations from across Greater Manchester.



Rise

To create this brand identity, we looked at what the campaign was trying to achieve on the whole, and how we could reflect that with the associated brand elements. The fundamental values behind this campaign are protection, partnership, and pressure. Pressure that people feel from the advertisers was reflected in the David and Goliath style tension in size between the ‘Against’ and ‘the Odds’ text within the logo and typemark.

The idea is that ordinary sports fans and sports clubs need to increase the pressure on sports organisations who choose to partner with gambling brands and ease the burden of responsibility on consumers.

The slash used throughout the brand represents the way that the odds are presented (2/1 etc). However, beneath this, the slash also resembles a protective seatbelt that the campaign wishes to develop to protect sports fans from harm. Against the Odds isn’t just about ‘crossing out’ gambling sponsorship and advertising in sport, it’s about supporting people who are affected, and preventing further harms. Working with the Healthy Stadia, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and all connected stakeholders was a collaborative effort. We worked together to make sure that the messaging and branding for this campaign was nuanced, and the various target audiences all felt seen, understood and represented. The campaign itself is all about teamwork - people coming together as a movement in support of this cause. To this end, we created the shield badge graphic to give the overall brand a sporting and team feel to it. A team has a chance of succeeding even when the odds are against them.



Outshine
The team at Healthy Stadia loved the brand workshop at the beginning of the journey, and said “Thanks for facilitating an eye-opening workshop last Friday at GMCA. This was a really useful workshop and I think attendees will have got a lot of value out of this both in terms of the ambitions of the Against the Odds project, but also how they think about developing other projects.”



On completion, Michael Viggars, Project Lead said:

"We were delighted to work with Dawn to create the Against the Odds brand. Sport is such a huge part of our local communities and has huge potential to support good health and wellbeing. Unfortunately, through the lack of robust legislation we have allowed gambling brands to take advantage of our love of sport and they now relentlessly promote harmful products to millions of children, young people, and vulnerable adults every week. Against the Odds is campaigning for sports organisations to think again on the suitability of gambling sponsorship.


“This is no ordinary campaign, and Dawn were instrumental in creating a brand that reflected the sports community in Greater Manchester but also took on board the perspectives of individuals who have been directly or indirectly harmed by gambling. Their expert designers have created a nuanced, flexible, and powerful brand that is helping us to engage with sports clubs and sports organisations big and small across the region. We are Against the Odds, but Dawn have given us a fantastic set of tools to start levelling the playing field.”


We’re proud of the end result, and happy to have been a part of getting brand awareness for this brilliant cause.