LinkedIn’s OOH campaign for UEFA Women's EURO highlights the importance of female role models

As national sponsor of the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022, LinkedIn spotlights the importance of role models that inspire future generations on and off the pitch with the OOH campaign.

by Lucy Shelley 06 July 2022

As part of their sponsorship of the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022, LinkedIn has launched a campaign across out-of-home (OOH) and digital, encouraging influencers, creators, and its community to champion female role models who have inspired them, using the #FollowInHerFootsteps hashtag.

Carol Thomas, England’s first Women’s EURO 2022 captain in 1984, led a 30-mile historic walk earlier this week to encourage others to ‘Follow in Her Footsteps’. Thomas began the walk at Crewe’s Mornflake Stadium (the site of the first Women’s EURO game in 1984), and finished at Old Trafford where this year’s tournament kicked off today.

The campaign will run for four weeks on earned and paid media across OOH and digital channels, including LinkedIn, and a paid media partnership with Telegraph Women’s Sport.

The sponsorship is the latest in a series of campaigns and initiatives from LinkedIn focused on ‘making work work for women’, designed to address the issues women face professionally and build a more equitable world of work for all.

The fully integrated campaign was produced by Girl&Bear, created in partnership with creative agency VCCP London and PR agency Brands2Life.

Relatable role models should be more visible

The campaign was inspired by research commissioned by LinkedIn, which revealed that nearly half (43%) of professional women believed they would be more successful if they had a role model in the workplace. More than half of women surveyed (55%) agreed that there is still a lack of relatable role models in the workplace, and 76% of them believed that relatable role models should be more visible. They felt strongly about this lack of visibility, with 57% believing that having a relatable role model is crucial to achieving career success and 70% agreeing it’s easier to be like someone you can see.

Darain Faraz, International Brand Marketing Director at LinkedIn commented: “At LinkedIn, we’re championing an equitable world of work that’s diverse and inclusive – the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022 epitomises and celebrates these values. This sponsorship follows LinkedIn’s global partnership earlier this year with International Women’s Day – where our campaign sought to break biases around career flexibility. Sponsoring what is set to be the largest women’s European sporting event in history felt like a natural next step in our sustained commitment to making the world of work work for women.”

Thomas will be joined on the walk by other role models from the world of football, including professional player for Crystal Palace F.C. Chloe Morgan; first captain of the Somali Women’s National Team and Director of Women’s Football at Hilltop Football Club, Iqra Ismail; former England footballer (gaining 129 caps) Rachel Yankey, and retired Swedish Captain and Thomas’s former opponent, Anette Borjesson. LinkedIn’s UK Country Manager, Janine Chamberlin, also joined Thomas for the duration of the walk.

Matt Lloyd, Deputy Executive Creative Director at VCCP, added: “We were inspired by LinkedIn’s mission to make female role models more visible and our team went in search of a way to bring this to life that would demonstrate the power of the platform.”