Creative impulse

Eighteen months in the making, the new, 90-second, pounds 3m TV film for Reebok football boots features advertising's biggest-ever line-up of stars. 21 celebrities, among them ex-Take That member Robbie Williams, Welsh crooner Tom Jones and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, proclaim their love of football and their admiration for the Manchester United player Ryan Giggs. The celebrities volunteered their time for a nominal fee, and a donation was made on their behalf to charity.

The client: Reebok

Robert Fallows, UK marketing director

We got into a situation where the message coming back to us from market research on all brands was that consumers want products that throw a switch in their heads. What the consumer was telling Reebok was "we know you're a genuine sports performance brand, but we really want to see another side to you". So we decided to use wit, and it really opened up another side to Reebok - that there is a sense of humour here. We're not just about running up hills and jumping over fences; there's a social message in there as well.

We wanted to talk about passion for sport, and we decided to use football, and a "who do you dream of being?" idea. Although the people we approached happen to be famous, sport is for everybody, irrespective of background. These are people who you might think had everything in life, but would give it all up for 15 minutes to be a professional footballer at Wembley.

The agency: Lowe Howard-Spink

Jeremy Bowles, account director

This follows on from a commercial called "Dream Team", where they had Best and Charlton and all the previous greats from Manchester United. The brief was to maintain what we'd achieved and try to strengthen our position, continuing in the same area of fantasy and passion. With a player like Ryan Giggs, you've got a lot of people who really admire him. We are tapping into that total admiration - people venerating his obvious skills.

The difficult bit was getting those people: it was an incredible leap of faith on everybody's part, and when we started we didn't have everybody signed up. But it gained momentum, and the reason people did it was that they were passionate about the game. We've appropriated that passion and branded it Reebok. It's very brave because it doesn't actually show Ryan Giggs and it doesn't show football.

We purposefully got a diverse range of celebrities, from the extreme of the Las Vegas/Hollywood set to the really hip figures. That's the beauty of it: it demonstrates that football is such a huge game in this country that fans are drawn from all walks of life.