Adidas was celebrating double World Cup success after its #allin campaign was tweeted over one million times throughout tournament.
As well as being the kit manufacturer of winners Germany, research undertaken by multi-channel marketing agency Threepipe has shown that adidas leads the way in terms of FIFA World Cup Twitter hashtag campaigns.
The brand’s #allin campaign was tweeted over one million times throughout the tournament, with rival Nike’s #riskeverything hashtag being mentioned by just 267,000 Twitter users in comparison.
adidas’ use of player assets and retail partners including Mesut Ozil, Oscar, World Soccer Shop and Soccer.com to push the campaign meant #allin was used at consistently high levels as the tournament progressed.
Nike’s campaign, which initially saw good levels of engagement, faltered due to a lack of impactful tweets from their talent roster. adidas also scored with its #ballin campaign, designed to draw attention to the official World Cup Brazuca ball, achieving the fourth highest level of engagement with 104,000 uses.
Coca Cola’s #worldscup was the second most successful hashtag campaign from FIFA Official Partners and Sponsors, with the brand’s established user base across a range of markets engaging with the campaign, delivering 117,000 uses. Rivals Pepsi largely ignored the World Cup from a Twitter point of view, despite launching a star-studded, interactive video campaign in April. The brand did have a #futbolnow campaign, run entirely through @Pepsi_Arabia, which garnered just 18,000 mentions.
Listerine’s #powertoyourmouth hashtag, despite having exposure to a global audience through pitch-side boards, was used just over 2,000 times, suggesting that fans didn’t find the campaign particularly engaging. Listerine abandoned its #PowerToYourMouth hashtag following Luiz Suarez’s bite on Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini, rather than trying to capitalise on the incident in a humorous way as other brands have done to great effect.
Puma’s #startbelieving was one of the most successful non-partner campaigns, using athletes including Usain Bolt, Mario Balotelli and Dante to great effect, achieving 70,100 uses.
The 2014 FIFA World Cup has generally been regarded as the most ‘social’ World Cup to date. With 35.6 million tweets, the Brazil vs Germany Semi-Final clash is officially the most-discussed single sports game ever on Twitter.
During the 90-minute clash, adidas’ #allin campaign had over 17,000 uses alone, with National Sponsor Itau managing to capitalise on the fixture by generating some 3,100 mentions of its #issomudaojogo campaign.
In the world of unbranded hashtag campaigns, #worldcup and #worldcup2014 were, unsurprisingly, way out in front with 1.92m and 1.01m respectively. The power of real-time, quick reactions and humour were highlighted when Tim Howard’s performance against Belgium set Twitter alight, with over 336,000 uses of #thingstimhowardcouldsave.
Eddie May, Threepipe Co-Founder, said of the research: “What these results highlight is that simply putting a hashtag in front of a campaign strapline doesn’t magically turn it into a winning social campaign.
“The ones that worked well were relevant, simple lines that fans could use in a natural way. They were also part of a wider brand campaign that was well integrated across channels and markets.
“It helps if you have a roster of big names attached to your campaign, but what some of the unbranded success stories showed is the power of humour and real-time response in getting genuine traction with football fans.”
