Which Advertiser Won World Cup 2018?
July 16, 2018
World Cup Russia 2018 was arguably one of the most exciting and captivating in recent history. Even though neither the US nor Canadian teams qualified for the global sporting tournament, related World Cup digital video advertisements still managed to garner 790 million views to date and we believe this number will be much higher as we see views continue to accumulate in the coming weeks. Here are some of the trends we identified considering digital video advertising around this major event:
Music Matters
Everyone remembers Shakira’s 2010 Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) World Cup theme song, right? Music has always been an integral part of World Cup, partially because of its ability to truly bring people together. This torch was carried on in 2018 as 4/10 of the top advertisers focused their digital video ads around the concept that music is a universal language with a special power to instill unity and positivity among people.
#2 Hyundai x 2018 FIFA World Cup
#3 Coca-Cola FIFA World Cup
#8 Qatar Airways Dancing In The Street
#10 Beats by Dre Made Defiant: The Mixtape
You don’t have to be in the World Cup to win the World Cup.
Advertisers proved that you didn’t have to be in the World Cup to participate in the action. The #1 chart spot was snagged by an unsuspecting contender – Wish’s #TimeOnYourHands spot featured Tim Howard entertaining himself by throwing a pool party since Team USA didn’t qualify this year. This campaign garnered 127,361,041 views though the advertiser was not an official FIFA sponsor.
Similarly, Nike was actually able to place above Adidas in the top 10 chart with a celebrity-heavy campaign, Believe. Although Adidas created multiple digital video ads for the tournament and was an official FIFA sponsor, only one of its ads was able to crack the top 10. Some have speculated that this may have been due to Nike’s strategic approach to sponsoring individual teams (Nike was the official sponsor of both final teams in the cup, Croatia and France) allowing them significant presence on the fields throughout the tournament, as CNBC pointed out: ‘Of the total 150 goals scored leading up to the finals, Nike cleats were worn for 94 of them.’
High Performance = High Performance
We looked at viewership of ads on all the featured soccer players’ social channels and found that Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a Swedish soccer player who is not playing in the World Cup this year, drove the most views on sponsored content with over 44 million views across his platforms, beating out players like Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo. While many World Cup ads featured soccer players, it was the social media powerhouses who made the biggest impact. Zlatan partnered with Visa for a World Cup campaign and drove the most views on his paid posts of any other soccer player promoting branded content, with over 41 million views attributed to his social channels.
Take a look at the full Top 10 Digital Video Ads ranking here:
