By Brad Rees, CEO, Mediacells
It’s the World Cup and instantly everyone’s a football fan.
To paraphrase the late Mark E Smith of The Fall, “If it’s me and your granny on Bongos, it’s a World Cup event.” Or, as Romy Gai, FIFA’s Chief Business Officer puts it, ‘This tournament is designed to be shaped and shared by fans wherever they are.’
It’s the fans who are turbo-charging this tournament at official, unofficial and crossover guerilla levels.
Officially, Unilever deployed 50,000 ‘global creators’ to produce fan-centred social media clips with the intention of transforming traditional sports sponsorship into authentic peer-to-peer content, reaching beyond the traditional football audiences. Dove’s men’s and women’s personal care brands have reportedly reached 120 markets so far through the initiative.
McDonald’s turned the World Cup Meal into a Cup Hunt in every box, transforming a Maccy D’s meal into a prize draw, using old skool football stars like David Beckham and Thierry Henry to launch it, attracting 8 million engagements, mostly from fan-generated, organic content.
Social media video content has changed the speed of brand messaging from a fixed, immoveable object to an unstoppable force and is best punctuated by the quadrennial Nike v Adidas brand Battle Royale.
Official Adidas vs Unofficial Nike is always the off-the pitch rivalry during the height of World Cup fever. Nike’s Rip the Script ad-movie features Mbappé, Haaland and Ronaldo and is a ‘step inside the universe of Nike football’, attracting nearly 80 million YouTube views.
The campaign brings together some of the biggest names in football today, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland and Vini Jr. It also features football icons like Eric Cantona and Ted Lasso, making it, as Nike riffs, “the connection to football and the game’s influence beyond the pitch.”
Adidas’ £50-million-budget campaign Backyard Legends features soccerati A-listers Lionel Messi, Jude Bellingham, Lamine Yamal and Zinedine Zidane and may have a tenth of the YouTube views of the Nike movie, but consumer mindshare is just as much about the physical and visceral as it is the digital and ephemeral.
A walk around Manhattan for Beeb sports journalist Simon Casson shows how the German brand has tapped into football culture beyond the pitch with everything from lavender Adidas shirts featuring Timothée Chalamet, to viral Instagram posts of an insanely cute Pomeranian puppy, draped in a mutt-bespoke Mexico shirt. Sadly, the social media engagement of the pooch’s post is as small and restricted as the Pomeranian gene pool but hey, that’s organic content for you!
It’s not just official brand budgets that play the central part in the world football conversation, but you need to be a huge brand, for the most part, to join in and amplify. When the exterior to Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco was covered with white sheets to protect official sponsors, a cultural moment was accidentally born.
The tautly stretched white shroud left the inimitable silhouette of the Levi’s ‘Batwing’ logo, completely visible and recognisable. The jeans brand quickly (and non-litigiously) turned the censorship into a massive meme play, generating millions in free, viral exposure and rewriting the traditional sports marketing playbook.
The format of the World Cup has expanded from a 32- to 48-team tournament but the everyday, commercial gamechanger has been the introduction of Hydration Breaks which has the double tap of generating hundreds of millions in premium TV-ad revenue by official drink sponsor Powerade alongside related and unrelated sponsors like Michelob Ultra and AT&T as well as eliciting guttural disapproval from the world’s sofa dwellers.
So, for the most part you need to be a giant brand with massive marketing heft to become, in any significant way, memorable in the World Cup global conversation – but there are always outliers nicking through the brand guardian wall.
Feelgood stories like Tim Payne, the New Zealand defender who went from 5k to 5m followers since the start of the tournament because some random, monofocused Argentinian influencer, Valen Scarsini, made it his mission this summer to increase clogger Tim’s follower rate to nearly 1,000 new followers per minute!
Official partners won by using their multi-million-dollar access to unlock inventory that money simply cannot buy right before and during live matches.
But ambush and guerrilla marketers found massive success by completely ignoring stadium boundaries and inserting themselves directly into fan culture.
