Most sports brands spend months trying to stop unreleased products from leaking. On appears to have done the opposite.
As Kylian Mbappé started wearing prototypes of On’s first football boots, eagle-eyed fans noticed a small code printed on the side: ON-DCPT-KM010. Then Thierry Henry, now On’s Director of Football, shared his own pair carrying another code.
Those codes were not manufacturing clutter. They were clues.
The Product Became A Treasure Hunt
Football creator Ben Black picked up the trail. Entering Mbappé’s code on On’s website produced another hint: “Inspect the site.”
Open the browser inspector and a hidden environment appeared, styled like an employee’s desktop inside On Labs. There were locked folders labelled with warnings including “DO NOT SHARE.” Enter Mbappé’s code and one opened. Henry’s unlocked another.
Inside: unreleased images and videos showing On’s football prototypes in development.
Black shared what he had “found,” even jokingly asking the brand not to get him into trouble. Except Footpack reports that his video was sponsored by On, and that Black had recently been at the company’s headquarters with Mbappé. The leak was never really a leak. It was the campaign.
And it is incredibly smart.
On Made Discovery The Media
Marketing professor Jonah Berger calls this social currency: people share things that make them look knowledgeable, connected or ahead of everyone else.
His famous example is New York speakeasy Please Don’t Tell, hidden behind a phone booth inside a hot dog restaurant. The secrecy makes discovering it valuable because knowing the secret says something about you. Berger breaks social currency into three useful mechanics: make something remarkable, turn discovery into a game, and make people feel like insiders.
On hits all three.
The content is remarkable because these are unreleased boots being developed for one of football’s biggest stars. The codes create a game. And reaching a folder literally marked DO NOT SHARE makes the person who finds it feel like they have seen something they were not supposed to.
So they share it.
Not because On asked them to amplify a campaign, but because sharing proves they found the secret.
A Brilliant Way To Enter Football
The strategy is especially sharp because On is new to the category.
Mbappé left a nearly 20-year relationship with Nike to become a global On partner in September, in a deal that includes both cash and equity. Thierry Henry is leading the football division, while On says its first boots will launch commercially in 2027 using LightSpray technology adapted from its running products.
That gives On months to keep people interested in a product they cannot buy yet.
Instead of filling that gap with conventional launch advertising, it is letting fans watch the product emerge prototype by prototype, code by code.
Nike can pay to make sure people see its advertising.
On has created something people actively search for, decode and then tell everyone else they found first.
The ad is not the leak.
The ad is the feeling that you discovered it.