Heroes of Today How DDB Spain United Six Brands Against Racism in Sport
Heroes of Today is a 2019 multi-brand social-impact film campaign created by DDB Spain that confronted racial discrimination in sport by connecting the historical experience of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics with documented contemporary racist abuse targeting athletes in Spain and beyond.
The campaign launched in April 2019 in Spain under the platform name Héroes de Hoy, which translates directly as Heroes of Today. Rather than a single advertiser, the initiative united six participating organisations — LaLiga, Iberia, Correos, Telepizza, Clínica Baviera, and 11811 — into a coalition committed to confronting intolerance and discrimination in sport. As reported by Campaign Brief Asia, the platform was conceived to demonstrate that major brands could collectively take a stance on a social problem that individual voices alone struggle to shift. The coalition structure was itself a strategic argument: racism in sport is not one organisation's problem, and the campaign's architecture reflected that position.
The central creative mechanism drew on the journey of Jesse Owens — the American track-and-field athlete whose four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics became one of sport's most celebrated acts of defiance against racial ideology — and set that historical narrative against the language of present-day discrimination. Real tweets directed at contemporary athletes of colour were woven into the narrative, creating a temporal collision that argued, without ambiguity, that the prejudice Owens faced has not been eradicated. In the Spanish market, where LaLiga has faced repeated incidents of racist abuse in football stadiums, the campaign arrived with immediate cultural resonance. The Héroes de Hoy platform carried a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting its strong creative ambition and multi-stakeholder design.
Héroes de Hoy addressed a specific and documented tension in Spanish sport. LaLiga, one of the six coalition partners, had by 2019 already been associated publicly with incidents of racist chanting and abuse directed at players of colour, a problem that organisations such as FARE Network — the Football Against Racism in Europe network — had been monitoring across European football for years. The campaign positioned sport not as the source of the problem but as the arena in which society's unresolved attitudes become most visible and most audible.
The strategic insight at the centre of Heroes of Today was one of temporal continuity. By choosing Jesse Owens and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, DDB Spain selected a moment that audiences globally recognise as a moral landmark — a Black athlete excelling in defiance of an explicitly racist regime. Placing real, contemporary racist tweets alongside that historical narrative made the campaign's argument structural rather than rhetorical: the language has changed, the platforms have changed, but the impulse has not. As documented by Reason Why, the campaign used this contrast as its primary persuasive engine.
The coalition model distinguished Heroes of Today from the conventional single-brand purpose campaign that had become prevalent in sports marketing by 2019. Competitors in the purpose-driven sports communication space, including Nike with its Colin Kaepernick-led campaigns and Adidas with its broader diversity initiatives in the same period, operated through single-brand authority. DDB Spain's approach inverted that logic, arguing that shared commitment across sectors — aviation, postal services, food delivery, healthcare, and sport — carries a different kind of credibility. In Spain specifically, where institutional trust in individual corporations can be limited, the multi-brand structure offered a form of collective accountability that a single sponsor could not replicate.
The film at the heart of Heroes of Today was directed by the directing collective BRBR through production company Garlic. The work dramatised Jesse Owens's journey to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin in 1936, reconstructing the emotional and physical experience of a Black athlete competing under the gaze of a regime built on racial supremacy. That historical reconstruction was then punctuated by real racist tweets directed at contemporary athletes, a creative device that collapsed more than eighty years of history into a single continuous line of prejudice.
The creative team at DDB Spain was led by Creative General Manager José María Roca de Viñals, with Executive Creative Directors Daniel Rodríguez, Nerea Cierco, and Alfredo Vaz overseeing the campaign's direction. Art direction was handled by Fernando Morate, with copywriting by Arturo Dorado. The account was directed by Alejandro Lavezzolo, with production directed by Enrique Feijoo and produced on the agency side by Beatriz Mancha, as documented by reasonwhy.es and adsoftheworld.com.
The decision to incorporate real social media content into a period film was not merely a stylistic choice. It functioned as evidence. By presenting actual tweets — unedited and unsanitised — the film refused the comfortable position that racism in sport is a historical artefact. The production craft served this argument directly: the visual language of the 1936 sequences gave the film an elegiac, documentary weight, while the intrusion of contemporary digital text created deliberate dissonance. As covered by Little Black Book and selfstorming.com, the campaign's film format was the primary and sole media asset, concentrating the entire creative argument into a single piece of work rather than distributing it across multiple executions. That restraint is itself a creative decision, and one that gave Heroes of Today a coherence and impact that fragmented multi-format campaigns often sacrifice.
Heroes of Today earned recognition at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2019. As reported by selfstorming.com and adsoftheworld.com, the campaign received a Gold Lion in the Entertainment Lions category, one of the festival's most competitive and creatively demanding classifications. Recognition at Cannes Lions at Gold level in 2019 placed Heroes of Today among the most awarded social-impact campaigns produced in Spain in that year, and among the most recognised anti-racism campaigns in sport produced anywhere in Europe during that period.
No verified commercial performance data — such as brand lift figures, earned media reach totals, or platform engagement metrics — for the Heroes of Today campaign is publicly available beyond the award recognition documented by selfstorming.com, adsoftheworld.com, and elpublicista.es. The absence of proprietary metrics is consistent with the campaign's structure: as a multi-brand public-interest coalition rather than a commercial product campaign, Heroes of Today was not optimised for attributed sales or conversion, and its effectiveness is more appropriately assessed through cultural impact and industry recognition.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on three durable decisions. The coalition architecture gave the message institutional weight that no single brand could have provided. The use of real tweets as evidence rather than dramatised abuse gave the film factual credibility. And the choice of Jesse Owens — a figure whose story carries near-universal recognition — ensured that the campaign could travel beyond Spain's borders while remaining anchored in a specific, ongoing problem visible in Spanish sport. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executed its brief with clarity and earned significant industry validation, while operating within the inherent constraints of a coalition public-interest model.
Heroes of Today is a 2019 film campaign created by DDB Spain that confronted racial discrimination in sport. Launched in April 2019 in Spain under the platform name Héroes de Hoy, it united six brands — LaLiga, Iberia, Correos, Telepizza, Clínica Baviera, and 11811 — to address racism and intolerance in sport collectively.
Jesse Owens represented an internationally recognised moment of athletic defiance against racial ideology at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. DDB Spain used his story to connect historical discrimination with contemporary racist abuse, presenting real tweets alongside the period narrative to argue that the prejudice Owens faced remains present in sport today.
Six organisations participated in the Héroes de Hoy coalition. As reported by Campaign Brief Asia and adsoftheworld.com, the participating brands were LaLiga, Iberia, Correos, Telepizza, Clínica Baviera, and 11811, forming a cross-sector coalition to confront racial discrimination and intolerance in Spanish sport.
Heroes of Today won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2019. As reported by selfstorming.com and adsoftheworld.com, the recognition came in the Entertainment Lions category, placing the DDB Spain campaign among the most awarded anti-racism and public-interest sports campaigns produced in Europe that year.
The Heroes of Today film was directed by the directing collective BRBR through production company Garlic. Creative leadership at DDB Spain included Creative General Manager José María Roca de Viñals, Executive Creative Directors Daniel Rodríguez, Nerea Cierco, and Alfredo Vaz, as documented by reasonwhy.es and adsoftheworld.com.
Heroes of Today used a multi-brand coalition model rather than single-brand authority. While Nike and Adidas pursued purpose-driven sports narratives through individual brand platforms in the same period, DDB Spain assembled six organisations across different sectors, arguing that shared institutional commitment carries a form of credibility no single sponsor can replicate.
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