In digital advertising, if you haven’t planned your event-based campaigns several months – or more – before the event takes place, it’s usually too late.
Which is why, although the World Cup doesn’t begin until Thursday, Unilever-owned antiperspirant brand Degree has been running ads featuring US men’s national soccer team star Christian Pulisic since early April.
And as an official FIFA sponsor, Degree has also committed to a certain number of volume-based media buys during official World Cup televised events as early as 18 months ago, Dominick Pace, president of media at WPP Unite, told me. (WPP Unite, by the by, is a dedicated agency within WPP that works with Unilever brands.)
Which isn’t to say that Degree’s entire World Cup strategy was set in stone from the beginning. According to Pace, Degree puts its ad spend into two buckets: direct, event-driven placements and more biddable buys informed by audience signals.
Chris Symmes, Degree’s head of marketing, put it even more succinctly. The brand is ultimately trying to find what he calls “the balance between being proactive and reactive.”
From Telemundo to YouTube
For “proactive” buys, WPP Unite is spending a great deal with Telemundo, where the Spanish-language World Cup broadcasts will air. But it’s also running ads across the CBS Sports Golazo Network, a Paramount-owned FAST channel entirely devoted to soccer.
Plus, there’s YouTube, where Degree is already partnering with creators and buying inventory to try and “own specific dates,” said Pace.
Meanwhile, on the programmatic side, WPP and Degree want to reach viewers before they’re even thinking about the World Cup. For example, the agency is buying takeovers of Vizio TV home screens, using data from Walmart (Vizio’s parent company) to identify relevant households and potential Degree shoppers.
The integration with retailers is especially important, because they’re business partners as much as they are sales channels. In fact, Pace said that when working with CPG brands, he likes to think of retailers as customers, too, because they’re technically buying the products to stock on shelves before the end consumer does.
Degree uses retail data to serve both sides of the equation: retail partners and potential customers, Pace said.
Putting in the work
World Cup fever happens to coincide with a larger refresh for Degree, said Symmes. When he first joined in the fall of 2024, the brand was at an “inflection point” regarding the efficacy of its communications strategy.
After determining via brand research that Degree is seen as a high-intensity athletic brand, Symmes and his team decided that its new “Here for Sweat” messaging should be more inclusive of other forms of effort, like getting through a busy work day or making time for your kids.
“Traditional demographics are very important from a media buying perspective, but it’s then how you show up with personalized messaging that really can get the brand over the finish line when it comes to driving consideration,” said Symmes.
Being deliberate with data
Speaking of personalized messaging, both Symmes and Pace also stressed that Degree is now leaning hard into a social-first strategy.
That means spending on social video, of course, but, more importantly, it means using social listening to uncover insights that can inform a brand’s creative ideas and go-to-market strategy.
WPP Unite uses data in a similar way, which Pace said goes beyond only targeting specific audiences and involves building campaigns “from the ground up” using a combination of first-party data, consumer behavior and retailer data sources.
The trick, Pace said, is to separate the signals from the noise.
At the other end of the consumer journey, Degree tracks a number of different metrics to determine campaign success, including brand lift, engagement and conversion. Although the current World Cup campaign will likely lead to a surge in brand awareness, both Degree and WPP Unite are hoping that their efforts will lead to direct sales, too.
Historically, CTV has been used more as an awareness play, said Symmes.
But, he added, “with so much information available to marketers now about who is watching those programs on which platforms, there is a much bigger opportunity around how we think about driving contextual relevance.”
The idea is simple: Relevance drives conversion. Score!
