Adidas is an official partner of the FIFA World Cup. It supplies the official match ball, which becomes the symbol of the brand’s sponsorship role every four years.

In 2010, the ball was a disaster, with widespread negative coverage. This piled the pressure on the 2014 replacement. We had to shift this perception, helping adidas reach its World Cup ball sales targets.

We created @brazuca as a vehicle to take fans behind-the-scenes and up close to the action in real time, with brilliant football insight and an irreverent tone of voice that cut through football cliché.

Lightning-fast real-time reactive tweets made it part of the biggest tournament conversations. We kept momentum going off the pitch too, giving Brazuca a celebrity lifestyle, meeting everyone from David Beckham to the Pope, Pharrell to Pitbull.

The press wanted a piece of the action too. Brazuca, despite being an inflated sphere without a mouth, was in demand for media interviews including a profile by Mashable.

The ball and the Twitter handle became a hot topic in sports, fashion, business, design and technology media, as well as in the football press and national daily newspapers.

It even enjoyed the honour of exclusively tweeting the shortlist for the FIFA Golden Ball Award, which is given to the best player at the tournament.

@Brazuca was a storming success. Gary Lineker followed it; along with writers, sports & tech personalities, media, musicians and football stars. Even Justin Bieber was tweeting about @Brazuca.

Brazuca achieved worldwide media coverage in publications covering everything from fashion to football; and built a community of over 3.4 million @brazuca followers. Mashable even interviewed our ball.

Our tweets were retweeted over 232,000 times, with a reaction to goal line technology retweeted almost 16k times alone (more than Oreo’s dunk in the dark!) - https://twitter.com/brazuca/status/478268237424365568. Twitter impressions amounted to 1,032,067,579.

adidas sold a record number of World Cup balls, smashing its targets by selling 1 million more units than the 2010 World Cup ball. @Brazuca was the fastest-growing Twitter account during the tournament, verified on the platform and achieved hugely positive sentiment across the board.