While women across industries push for equal opportunities and pay, soccer stands out with some progress – thanks to key female stars and the global success of the USWNT. The rising focus and viewership of women’s sport, is driving new marketing prospects. Brands aim to captivate both female and younger viewers – the latter of whom are 1.5 times more likely to be highly engaged with the sport.
Read on to learn the source of success behind Women’s World Cup video ads among American viewers. iSpot’s Creative Assessment tools focuses on the broader audiences where expansion opportunities exist.
Broad Brand and Business Achievers
The holy grail of marketing campaigns is to build both the business and the brand. Across the array of top performing ads within key age segments (16-20, 21-35, 36-49) and the female audience, only two brands consistently delivered just that with their 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup campaigns. Degree and Dick’s Sporting Goods effectively engaged a wide range of viewers through message-driven ads featuring one or more USWNT stars. Additionally, they cleverly integrated the brand/brand actions as a central character in their creative executions, which helped drive above-norm consideration by each set of viewers.
Degree: “Made You Look” :30 featuring Trinity Rodman, Sam Kerr, Estafanîa Banini
Unilever’s Degree captured strong breakthrough by showing some of the sport’s female athletes ‘making us look’ as they committed to partnering with FIFA to enable more girls to play the game. Across the gen pop audience, the 30-second spot ranked in the 94th percentile of personal care video ads (past year) in grabbing Attention and the 95th in Likeability while driving a +14 point advantage in Degree purchase intent that held strong across all audiences.
The message resonated with viewers from the ages of 16 to 49 as well as the key female target for Women’s World Cup advertisers – and branding in the opening, ending and audio ensured Degree recall (73% unaided).
Dick’s Sporting Goods: “Resilience Changes Results – Alex Morgan” :30
Dick’s Sporting Goods connected with a highly Inspiring and Heartfelt story of resilience and achievement by U.S. phenom Alex Morgan. Ranking in the 97th percentile of sporting goods store ads (past year) in overall resonance and breakthrough and 99th in Relevance, this :30 sparked extremely rare levels of Empowerment among American viewers.
The celebrity athlete successfully connected the messaging to the Dick’s Sporting Goods’ brand (and its Sports Changes Lives platform) among 79% of viewers, driving impressive spikes in purchase intent (particularly among women and 21-35 year old viewers).
Winning With Women
Fostering a positive brand perception with a new or widening audience is also a key objective for tentpole advertisers. Using Creative Assessment AI-enabled analytics, the sentiment expressed in nearly 25,000 verbatim comments on 2023 Women’s World Cup ads was measured. Four spots sparked an impressive 70% or higher positive sentiment among female viewers. These ads prominently featured USWNT players and consistently conveyed a message of female empowerment.
In addition to the Dick’s Sporting Goods and Degree ads outlined above, Adidas’ “Play Until They Can’t Look Away” featured a cast of female soccer players leveling up and succeeding against some of the sport’s biggest male athletes to entertain and engage women. A handful of the 338 female viewers comments about the spot showcase the level of engagement achieved:
Female 21-35
Female 36-49
Female 16-20
Frito-Lay aired multiple spots in a visually entertaining campaign that turned chips into an imaginative tabletop soccer game featuring avatars of past and present stars of the women’s game. The 30-second “FIFA Women’s World Cup: Table Game” drew high praise from female viewers for seamlessly weaving the brand into the storyline and for spotlighting female athletes – as shown in the viewer verbatim comments below.
Female 36-49
Female 16-20
Female 36-49
Female 21-35
Sentiment Subtext Linked to the Tournament
Beyond the overarching positive sentiment, Creative Assessment AI search identified notable themes within viewer feedback. It’s worth noting that not all video ads evoked every sentiment, and not all sentiments were positive. Effective execution and clear communication of the message emerged as critical factors:
Women/Girls in Sports/Soccer
As anticipated, American commentary on WWC ads revolved around themes of soccer and/or women and girls in sports. This underscores the relative success of various ads in connecting the brand with messaging, products, or storylines directly tied to the event. Interestingly, the approach did not always lead to success, as seen with Adidas’ “The Greatest Soccer Players” that engaged NFL and NBA/WNBA players in a conversation about the difference between “football” and “fútbol.”
Inspiring Message/Athlete
Ads that successfully elicited feelings of inspiration and motivation garnered positive response from key viewer segments and the overall audience. Even among women, ads featuring Megan Rapinoe tended to be highly polarizing as shown with the Google spot in the chart below.
Notably, considering the substantial investments made in major sporting events like the FIFA Women’s World Cup, it is both enlightening and somewhat surprising that one in every fifteen verbatims on tournament ads contained expressions of confusion, with the viral Orange “la Compil des Bleues (English version)” 2:00 falling in this group along with several (quite unusual) Nike spots.
Lessons Remain the Same
The standout video ads from the Women’s World Cup prominently featured female players, with significant representation from the U.S. team. The most successful ads skillfully integrated the brand or product within the narrative, while conveying a powerful message of female strength, ability, or empowerment. This strategy harmoniously resonated with audience anticipations and reaffirmed insights from numerous studies on the effective use of celebrities in advertising.