How MSQ and O2 turned the Red Roses into national icons

For all their dominance on the pitch, England’s women’s rugby team, aka the Red Roses, entered 2025 facing an uncomfortable reality off it. 

The team was world number one, serial champions and one of the most successful sides in global sport. Yet only 38% of rugby fans could name a Red Roses player. Awareness of the women’s side lagged 16 percentage points behind the men’s game. 

Ahead of a home Women’s Rugby World Cup, England Rugby and long-term partner O2 faced a defining challenge: how do you turn elite athletes into household names?

The answer became ‘England, Meet England’, an integrated campaign created by VCCP, activated by MSQ Sport + Entertainment and planned by Manning Gottlieb OMD, that aimed not simply to market O2’s involvement with the sport, but to achieve a decisive cultural shift around women’s rugby.

Built around O2’s long-running sponsorship of England Rugby - and its status as an official partner of the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup - the campaign represented the clearest expression yet of the telecoms brand’s gender parity commitment. Since 2021, O2 had matched investment in the men’s and women’s game pound-for-pound, becoming the first major rugby sponsor to formally commit to equal backing.

Make the Red Roses impossible to ignore

The strategy was built around a simple but ambitious objective: make the Red Roses impossible to ignore. What followed was one of the most expansive integrated activations that women’s rugby has ever seen, stretching across broadcast, social, retail, experiential, influencer marketing and live activation. 

Across seven weeks, the combined work of VCCP, MSQ and Manning Gottlieb OMD generated 218 million impressions and delivered movement in public awareness. By the end of the World Cup, Red Roses awareness had risen from 43% to 58%. The gender awareness gap had eroded from 16 points to just one. More than half of rugby fans could now name a Red Roses player.

At the heart of this effort was a concerted attempt to present the Red Roses not simply as athletes, but as personalities. The opening phase, ‘Introduce the Players’, leveraged O2’s access to the squad as England Rugby’s principal partner. MSQ created a ‘Leading Cast’ content series that showcased the individuality, humour and confidence of players who, despite their achievements, remained unfamiliar to many.

The films were distributed across O2, RFU and player channels, with the squad helping amplify content to a combined social audience of more than 500,000 followers. The series outperformed expectations - and established the tone for what followed: personality-led storytelling designed to build emotional connection.

One of the campaign’s biggest moments arrived with the launch of the hero TV ad, created by VCCP. Featuring Red Roses players skydiving in full England kit, the spot turned the squad into action-film protagonists rather than traditional sports stars. It was visually ambitious, deliberately cinematic and inextricably linked to the access that O2’s long-term partnership provided. Few brands outside a long-term rights holder relationship could have convinced an entire national squad to jump out of a plane for a campaign.

The ad helped reframe perceptions of women’s rugby. The players were presented with swagger, spectacle and scale - attributes historically reserved for men’s sport marketing. The same approach extended into outdoor media, where player portraits appeared across eight regions nationwide. Rather than generic shots, the imagery treated players like cultural figures, positioning them at the centre of the visual identity.

Different kind of storytelling

In terms of campaign activations, MSQ understood that reaching beyond traditional rugby audiences required a different kind of storytelling altogether.

MSQ’s most notable creative activation decision was recruiting Chabuddy G - the chaotic entrepreneur played by comedian Asim Chaudhry in BBC comedy People Just Do Nothing - as the Red Roses’ fictional PR manager.

The idea could easily have overwhelmed the athletes themselves. Instead, it became one of the campaign’s smartest strategic choices. Across a five-part content series, Chabuddy attempted to transform the Red Roses into viral celebrities through increasingly absurd schemes, including media training sessions, branding advice and the creation of an infamous leopard-print rugby shirt.

The comedy worked because Chabuddy - as is generally the case - was the joke. His delusional confidence and incompetence created space for the players’ personalities, wit and confidence to come through naturally. As a result, the series delivered more than 17 million views and performed well on TikTok and Meta platforms.

A significant take away is that Asim Chaudhry was heavily involved in shaping the content during development, helping ensure his character felt authentic rather than bolted onto a campaign. Much of the humour came through improvisation and genuine player reactions rather than scripted exchanges, giving the content an energy that traditional athlete campaigns often lack.

A key consequence is that the content escaped rugby’s traditional media bubble. By combining entertainment, comedy and sport, MSQ helped the Red Roses reach audiences who may never previously have engaged with women’s rugby content. The leopard-print shirt in particular became an unexpected commercial success. O2 turned the design into an exclusive Priority giveaway, generating more than 37,000 entries from customers wanting their own piece of ‘Chabuddy’ merchandise.

The activation didn’t stop there. O2 integrated the campaign across its broader ecosystem, including retail, customer rewards and venue rights. Ten O2 stores were temporarily rebranded as ‘Rose2’, bringing the message into physical spaces and reinforcing the scale of O2’s commitment to the women’s game.

Some of the most striking activation work came after England’s World Cup victory. Within minutes of the final whistle, reactive social content featuring Lioness Chloe Kelly congratulating the Red Roses went live, eventually generating more than 10 million views. The speed of execution reflected the depth of coordination between sponsor, agency and rights holder developed over three decades of partnership.

Soon afterwards, O2 delivered a landmark symbolic gesture: temporarily renaming London’s O2 arena “The Rose 2”. The players then travelled through London on a branded ‘England, Meet Your Champions’ bus carrying the names of the entire squad - a deliberate decision to celebrate collective visibility.

By the close of the World Cup, the Red Roses were no longer operating in the shadows of the men’s team. Awareness had shifted materially, engagement had surged, and O2’s long-standing gender parity strategy had delivered measurable returns both culturally and commercially. Research conducted by YouGov and the Women’s Sport Trust found O2 achieved the highest sponsor recognition of any Rugby World Cup partner during the tournament. Kantar tracking also showed significant increases in O2’s association with both Rugby Union and women’s rugby.

Delivered for the client

Commercially, the partnership delivered strongly for the client. Half of those exposed said they felt more positive about the brand, rising to 65% among 18–24-year-olds. Consideration for O2 products and services rose by more than 50% among younger audiences. The campaign also generated 267,000 Priority app offer accepts.

Overall, the campaign succeeded because it treated women’s rugby as worthy of the same creative confidence, production values and emotional scale typically afforded to the men’s game. Rather than positioning the Red Roses as an underdog story, the integrated campaign presented them as elite athletes and national personalities.

At the same time, it did this with humour. Women’s sport marketing has often fallen into the trap of earnestness - asking audiences to support teams because it is the right thing to do. England, Meet England focused on entertainment, personality and fame.

For O2, the success of the campaign reinforced the value of a partnership first established in 1995 and subsequently renewed through to 2031. For England Rugby, it created a stronger platform for future growth in the women’s game. And for MSQ, VCCP and Manning Gottlieb OMD, it showed how an integrated cross-agency campaign, when executed with imagination and ambition, can help change not just brand perception, but public consciousness itself.

For the industry, it helped validate a wider point: women’s sport, when marketed with the same ambition and creativity as the men’s game, can deliver similar returns.