How Passion for Soccer Turned to Passion for Brands at the World Cup – Cenk Bulbul, Google

We welcome our newest contributor to MediaBizBloggers, Cenk Bulbul of Google.

This is the first of our monthly posts from YouTube Insights, a quarterly report of stats and insights for brand advertisers. At this space on MediaBizBloggers we will telegraph important headlines from the report and talk about the so-what’s for marketers.

The first of our posts comes after a special month for consumers around the world. Yes, the FIFA World Cup. The World Cup has never been a bigger global moment. Since April, people have watched more than 1.7 billion minutes of World Cup ads on YouTube. That’s almost six times more than Super Bowl ads this year.

It is no surprise that brands attracted a lot of attention to their world-cup themed ads. The winners of the most popular YouTube Ads in Q2 were Nike and Samsung. Nike deserves a special call out for generating 100+ million views to its YouTube Ads in Q2 by connecting with its target consumers around a very big passion point -- soccer.

I would like to especially highlight Nike Phenomenal Shot.

In a new partnership of Google and Nike, we set out to tap into the real-time energy of live sports, experimenting with Google’s ad technology to deliver more engaging experiences across the web right when it matters most. With the Phenomenal Shot campaign, Nike delivered real-time ads that invited fans to celebrate, remix and share memorable sports moments just seconds after they happened. Through a specially designed, real-time delivery tool, these ads appeared across the sites and apps in the Google Display Network in 15 countries. For example, when Brazil’s Neymar Jr. scored a goal in the Cameroon match on June 23rd, Nike ads featuring Neymar Jr. in his goal celebration pose ran within ten seconds.

Brand advertising has been transforming for quite a while thanks to the new opportunities that technology and new platforms offer to them to connect with their customers in the moments that matter. We receive a lot of questions from brands on how to get started and how to make the jump to transform their brand marketing efforts to take advantage of this change.

Here are two thoughts to begin with:

Read the digital signals: Digital offers a great opportunity to track a brand’s marketing efforts almost real-time. In addition to proprietary sources of digital data, there are a lot of resources to see what’s trending and what’s popular with consumers. YouTube Search Trends is one such resource. Make sure you have these inputs constantly feeding into in your decision-making tools and insights-generation processes.

Get in the game: There is no better way to move the needle than starting to experiment, learning from experience and constantly improving. No team wins the World Cup without hard work and perseverance. Nike is just one of the many others who scored big. Adidas, Volkswagen and McDonald’s are others as you can read in this Forbes article. Beats by Dre and Samsung are others ads we captured in YouTube Ads Leaderboard. One thing that connects these brands is they are in the game.

You can find more insights at the YouTube Insights report here.

Cenk Bulbul is the Head of Strategy and Insights for Brand Advertiser Marketing team at Google, where he is responsible for the B2B marketing strategy for YouTube as well as publishing insights based on case studies and research. It is a good day on Cenk's team if their strategy and insights helped brand advertisers build successful marketing campaigns leveraging YouTube and other Google Brand Ad Solutions. Cenk can be reached at cenk@google.com.

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