When the England Lionesses secured back-to-back European titles with their victory over Spain in Basel yesterday, telecom giant EE was quick to respond, not just with congratulatory fanfare, but with a bold, national campaign grounded in both emotional impact and strategic media thinking.
Developed by Saatchi & Saatchi, the campaign titled “WHEN THIS SQUAD WINS, WE ALL WIN” puts a spotlight on unity, inspiration, and confidence. Deployed across high-impact out-of-home sites, the messaging taps into a collective national pride, while reinforcing EE’s brand platform of empowerment, particularly its ongoing commitment to supporting girls in sport.
But this is more than just timely brand alignment. It’s a masterclass in how OOH can deliver mass reach, emotional resonance, and long-term brand value, a view increasingly shared by leading marketing thinkers.
Les Binet and the Rebirth of Out-of-Home
Marketing effectiveness expert Les Binet has long argued that brand building happens best through broad reach, emotional salience, and long-term memory structures. While digital channels have become more targeted and transactional, Binet and his research partner Peter Field suggest that “broad-beam” media, especially out-of-home, has been undervalued.
Speaking recently, Binet pointed out that in a world of fragmented media and ad-skipping behaviour, OOH remains one of the few guaranteed-reach channels, particularly for younger and mobile audiences. It’s public, unskippable, and increasingly digitised—allowing brands to deploy agile creative like EE’s campaign, triggered in real-time by cultural moments.
EE’s decision to lean into out-of-home, rather than simply posting a congratulatory Tweet, is a deliberate move. It ensures the message reaches not just fans already watching the game, but the wider public, across streets, stations, and city centres. It gives the campaign permanence, scale and social proof. As Binet would put it: “OOH reaches people together, in the real world. That’s where brands are built.”
Ehrenberg-Bass and the Power of Physical Availability
This approach also aligns neatly with the foundational principles of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. According to their research, the key driver of long-term brand growth is not narrowly targeted engagement, but mental and physical availability, the ease with which a brand comes to mind and is found in buying situations.
Central to this is reach. The more people a brand speaks to, especially light or non-buyers, the greater the chance of driving future growth. It’s not about speaking to “your segment”, but to as many category buyers as possible. As Professor Byron Sharp puts it, “If you want to grow, you must get more people to buy you… occasionally.”
EE’s OOH campaign, delivered at scale and with national cultural relevance, does exactly that. It creates emotional memory structures, leverages momentum (England’s historic win), and ensures the brand is front of mind in a context that’s both uplifting and socially shared.
This is classic mental availability, EE isn’t selling SIM cards directly, but embedding itself into the national narrative.
Brand, Not Just Badge
Importantly, the campaign also strengthens EE’s brand beyond the category of telecoms. By championing confidence, community and support—values reflected in its broader “Everyone Needs a Squad” initiative, it’s tapping into meaningful cultural themes. This is brand building in its purest form: distinctiveness, emotional resonance, and consistent storytelling.
It’s a sharp reminder to marketers that brand-building isn’t dead, it just needs to be done with intelligence, timing and scale.
Final Thought
EE’s Lionesses campaign is a strong example of what happens when marketers blend creative responsiveness with media discipline. By backing cultural relevance with out-of-home impact, and aligning it with evidence-based brand growth theory—they’ve shown how to build memory, emotion and mass reach in one cohesive strike.
As Binet, Field and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have long argued: reach builds brands. And in 2025, the streets are once again where some of the smartest brands are showing up.
