Puma entered the world cup with a limited budget and had to pull something special to gain attention. They came up with a love = football campaign, a message they wanted to spread as far as they could.
Their viral attempt became one of their greatest stunts. The campaign was focused on the world cup fans and their endearing love for the game. They conducted an ambush marketing campaign which consisted of two viral videos that captured the world cup from a spectators view.
Competing with bitter rivals Nike, the company splashed over 400 million US dollars on the campaign which included designing and producing the controversial Jubilani ball. However Nike stole much of the attention at the last minute with their ‘write the future’ campaign which was viewed more than 15 million times on YouTube alone.
Sony, the record label of Kasabian hope the deal will help promote the band’s third album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, around the world, raising their international profile. The live matches are viewed by up to 1 billion viewers so they should have no problem.
Along with another video they were posted online anonymously and received worldwide attention, although they contained no branding whatsoever bloggers and journalists were quick to point out that it was part of the Puma brand.
“If we had just wanted a track there are thousands that we could have used but Kasabian are seen as a football band and that makes the track much stronger,” said Paul Molnar of the Premier League.
One by one the star players featured in the ads fell victim to what became known as the ‘Nike curse’ and were knocked out of the competition, a complete branding disaster. It seems in choosing to endorse some of the world’s biggest premiership players Nike had neglected to consider the most successful teams and thus lost the branding race.
Puma have managed some endorsement success with their successful Puma King football boot. They narrowly missed out on producing the new Liverpool football shirt
