#978 2024 · Supercell (Clash of Clans, with DAVID New York) · Mobile gaming
Clash of Clans turned Haaland's haters into players by letting them destroy his village
the problem
Endorsement reaches only a star's admirers; the larger rival base that hates him is treated as unreachable
background
Clash of Clans, launched in 2012, is a long-running mobile strategy game in which players build and defend a village while raiding others for resources. Its recurring problem as an ageing title is staying relevant and recruiting new players. Footballer Erling Haaland was a natural partner: he had played the game for a decade himself and carried a huge global following, so in 2024 Supercell made him the first real person ever depicted in the game.
The textbook reason to license a star is that their fans add reach — but ordinary endorsement reaches exactly the people who already like both the star and the game. The convention says nothing about the far larger cohort of football fans who actively root against Haaland: rival club supporters, and fans of any team he scores against. Those people will never respond to an advert praising him, but they are a reservoir of motivation no besotted fan base can match.
what everyone would do
The standard celebrity-endorsement play is to show the star loving the product so their fans copy them — on the theory that admiration transfers to the brand. But an advert that praises a divisive star stops being persuasive exactly where the star is hated; rival fans switch off or resent the brand for siding with the enemy, so the mainstream approach spends a fortune to reach only the easiest audience and never touches the bigger, angrier one.
what they saw
Supercell saw a divisive celebrity has two audiences but endorsement prices in one: fans buy for the star, haters would buy to destroy him — so it flipped the sign on his downside, making hatred the sole incentive.
the move
Instead of parading Haaland as a hero to be admired, Supercell deliberately cast him as the villain fans were allowed to punish. The campaign made raiding and destroying Haaland's in-game village — the one he had personally spent over a decade building — an official challenge, the 'Payback Time Challenge', and recruited his haters to do it: billboards near rival stadiums, print ads reacting live to his performances, and rival players daring fans to take him down. The hatred was monetised instead of ignored: the incentive offered to the haters was the revenge itself.
why it works
The incentive is the emotion itself, so no persuasion is needed and no budget is spent convincing. A fan pays a price — downloading, installing, raiding — that someone who merely 'likes' Haaland would never pay, because the reward is the visceral satisfaction of beating down a figure they have no way of attacking in real life; Clash of Clans hands them the only legal arena where the hatred can be acted out. Because the medium is the game, every hater recruited is also a player installed and engaged, so acquisition and engagement are the same act rather than separate funnels. And the mechanic is self-reinforcing: rival fans brag about the raid and share it, extending reach through the very rivalry the brand declines to smooth over.
the payoff
Its awards entry, self-reported and unverified elsewhere, claims 7.9bn impressions, 34m raid participants, and a 150% rise in new players
where it breaks
It depends entirely on the featured celebrity being genuinely polarising — with a large, active hate base that cares enough to act — so a likeable, low-controversy star has no resentment to monetise, and a star reviled in a way that crosses into abuse or reputational harm would make the mechanic backfire. It needs the destructive act to be safely contained inside a fabricated game world, which is why it cannot transfer to a physical product where 'ruining the rival's asset' would be real damage with legal and reputational consequences. And it converts hatred only while the incentive is novel; once the revenge novelty fades, re-running the same mechanic against the same face yields diminishing returns.
what came after
The work won the Entertainment Lions for Sport Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2025 alongside a One Show integrated Bronze and multiple Lions, and is cited in gaming and marketing trade press as the canonical move for turning a celebrity's detractors — not just his admirers — into an owned acquisition channel.
references
- [1]Clash of Clans invites people to raid Erling Haaland's village in OOH campaignRoastbrief, independent Latin American advertising trade news, 2024roastbrief.us
- [2]2025戛纳全场大奖合集（上）— Entertainment Lions for Sport数英 (Digitaling), Chinese advertising industry publication, 2025digitaling.com
Widely retold, only partly documented. Filed as hearsay.