First Cristiano Ronaldo, the Real Madrid star, then Brazil’s Neymar. Suddenly, what started as a pick up game turns into a bout of legends on a global stage; I found myself fixated on the video. Completely lost by the action, the excitement and the drama. I couldn’t wait to see what happens next.
A Commercial? No way, this was the best 5 minutes of television I had watched in months. Sorry House of Cards, Game of Thrones and any soccer match ever played on television; this was better.
But it was a commercial. With the World Cup just around the corner Nike has further evolved following the lead of companies like Red Bull and Coca-Cola who have turned their business storytelling into content marketing so native that you don’t realize you are consuming ads. It is the perfect blend of product placement, provocative storytelling and real-time marketing.
While opinions about Nike may vary, I must say that this Nike World Cup ad campaign warranted a big kudos for the team at Nike. After seeing the one-minute short for the commercial I found myself on YouTube searching for the full-length version and other commercials in the series. I ended up spending 25 minutes riding an elliptical while watching commercials, on purpose. Who does that?
Español: Cristiano Ronaldo y Forlán, enfrentados en un derby. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Campaign
At the end of the commercial one of the “Lads” that first took the pitch walks up to Ronaldo who is about to take the game winning penalty shot and pushes him aside. Without a word spoken he takes the ball off of the current worlds’ best player. The music stops, the fans in utter silence, and then he approaches the ball and buries it in the top corner.
Celebration ensues. The world has been put on notice. Here comes the World Cup and more importantly here is one more example of how brands in the future will connect with their consumer.
Gone are the days of ordinary advertisements. One by one the world’s best brands are risking everything as they commit to building stronger brand affinity through entertaining consumers with shortening attention spans and greater access to more content. Welcome to the future of marketing where brands, media and content meet seamlessly to create the ultimate level of customer engagement.
This post first appeared on Forbes and can be found here
Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.
