Creative Corner: Xbox's Missing Managers highlights, Word of the Year excites and Clearblue bedazzles

Late November, and while the year continues its usual flurry of festive ads, this week’s creative feels anything but predictable.

Instead of cinematic snowstorms and sentimental soft-focus storytelling, we’re looking at three campaigns that take familiar moments and flip them into something far more unexpected.

First up, Missing Managers by McCann, where Xbox, Football Manager and Sky Sports use gameplay itself to uncover the next generation of female football coaches; then we pivot to language with Oxford Word of the Year, which has been pulled out of the dictionary and thrust into the public arena; and finally, Clearblue arrives with a glittering twist on early parenthood.

Missing Managers: Xbox and Sky use gameplay to find the next generation of female football coaches

It always strikes me that, despite the rise and success of women’s football at a professional level that most of the managers are still men. Missing Managers, a new campaign from Xbox, Football Manager and Sky Sports, has set out to change that, turning virtual performance into real-world coaching opportunities for women.

While women’s football continues to surge, representation in management lags far behind: fewer than 9% of professional managers in the UK are women. To help unearth hidden talent, they have created an in-game challenge that can lead to a real coaching career.

Through Xbox’s Football Manager 26, female players can qualify for fully-funded coaching courses delivered with The Powerhouse Project, gaining UEFA certification and hands-on experience at Women’s Super League clubs. In a first for the franchise, successful participants will even appear as playable managers in future Football Manager editions, creating visibility for women’s leadership both on the screen and on the sidelines.

What I love about this campaign is that McCann does not just highlight a problem; it is genuinely creating pathways where women can lead from both the dugout and the dashboard. The Hayes, Weigmans’s and Bompastor’s of this world have proved it is possible, now for the next generation.

'Word of the Year' Gets Real

If there is one campaign at Christmas that journalists will spill the ink over that isn’t cinematic, heart-wrenching or starring the Grinch, it’s 'The Oxford Word of the Year'.

A cultural pulse check captures the mood and momentum of the moment and will grace everything from The Big Fat Quiz to the local pub quiz.

Normally announced once chosen, this year, Oxford University Press has changed it up and literally taken the word off the page and brought the words to life for a public vote. The contenders for 2025, Aura Farming, Biohack, and Rage Bait, no longer sit quietly in a dictionary but have been turned into full campaigning characters.

With manifesto films, campaign brochures, flyers and social-first content, each word becomes a personality, a movement, a contender fighting for attention in the chaotic arena where language is actually shaped: our socials.

The result is a provocative and at times absurd activation that reframes the Word of the Year from a linguistic announcement into a public, participatory moment. Voting closed this week, with the winning word revealed on 1 December.

A decision normally reserved for academic lexicographers, I’m in two minds on whether opening up Word of the Year to the public is a good or a bad thing. Part of me feels like it takes the shine off of the honour of becoming inducted into the official dictionary and all the pomp and circumstance that comes with it. But progress is progress, I guess.

Clearblue adds sparkle to the big reveal

September is the most popular month for births in the UK. That happy, festive, throw-caution-to-the-wind mood obviously spills over into the bedroom. Just in time for a flurry of late January revelations, Clearblue, the stick of dreams, has released a bedazzled pregnancy keepsake.

Gender reveals have become a social media meme, so why not the most private part of early parenthood? The pregnancy stick. The glittering stick, I must add, is not built for the actual task but for display and obviously the social feed. Or perhaps a little something to gift to the soon-to-be grandparents.

Most pregnancy tests are either tossed or tucked away. Clearblue’s new rhinestone-covered version shifts that ritual into a memento designed for gifting, photographing, and curating alongside ultrasound scans, tiny socks, and the first chapter of baby announcements.

Sentimental? Kitsch? Over the top? Where personal news now doubles as content, Clearblue’s bedazzled pregnancy stick is doing exactly what it was intended to do, trending on social.

That wraps up another edition of Creative Corner!

As always, if you're working on something that deserves the spotlight, or you've seen a campaign worth sharing, drop us a line: paul.lucas@fanclubpr.com