The World Cup is over, and football stars are cashing in
Under Armour, DoorDash, and American Eagle are just some of the international brands recruiting World Cup stars for new campaigns, trying to make the most of their peak moment.
The final whistle of the World Cup blew last week, Spain took the title, and a series of brands decided to take advantage of the momentum to launch campaigns with the biggest stars of the present and the past — who managed to cash in once again.
The sportswear company Under Armour, for example, was a very small player in this tournament. While hundreds of players wore the pink shoes of Adidas and Nike, it had fewer than ten players on the pitches. But one of them was Ferran Torres, the scorer of the winning goal, and that was enough.
The company chose a zoom-in photo of his shoes and promoted it with the caption "A champion's shoes don't come in pink" (287,000 likes). A few days later, a new campaign starring him went up under the branding Rest Less, in which his teammate, Fermín López, also takes part.
In fact, the victory contributed to the brand to such an extent that its heads decided to grant Torres a massive championship ring made of 18-karat pure gold and dozens of diamonds, designed especially for him together with the luxury jewelry brand Hoorsenbuhs and the fashion brand 424.
At the American delivery company DoorDash (the parent company of Wolt), they started their campaign with the Swedish star of the past, Zlatan Ibrahimović, even before the World Cup. During the tournament, the player filmed short, humorous videos dedicated to each national team that was eliminated from the competition.
With the end of the World Cup, the digital campaign continued with a series of videos referring to the bets of the company's customers regarding the winning team. In all of them, a goat also stars — in English, the meaning of GOAT is also "Greatest of All Time" (the way the star refers to himself).
Most prominent of all is Lamine Yamal, the young star (19) of the Spanish national team. The American fashion brand American Eagle signed him as early as January for five years, but even there they did not believe how much it would pay off.
"I'm not saying this as a CMO who can sometimes be too dramatic: we just can't believe that all the stars aligned, and everything we dreamed of is coming true in real time," said Craig Brommers, the brand's CMO, to the Retail Dive website. "It reflects what is happening in modern marketing today: the best plans are made, and then something exciting happens, and you change direction and try to exploit it to the end."
As part of the move, the name American Eagle was temporarily changed to "Lamine's Eagles," a new sign went up in Times Square in New York, and the name of one of the best-selling jeans was changed to AE 19 (Yamal's number in the national team). In addition, on August 26, a back-to-school campaign will go up starring him, promoting a new capsule collection. All the moves were defined as those that "challenge traditional advertising" and instead create a community around the brand.
