FIFA works with a select group of global partners for sponsorship rights to the largest sports and entertainment event in the world. Based on historic data, it was expected that over 1 billion people worldwide would watch the Final match of the FIFA World Cup 2018.

FIFA also wanted to offer its sponsors a more creative and innovative path to engage with fans around the world through FIFA’s various digital channels. FIFA sponsor Vivo Inc. was granted rights to the FIFA Stadium DJ event and sought to utilize this platform to reach a new set of consumers worldwide and expose them to the Vivo brand.

The objective of the campaign was to achieve the largest possible global reach and engagement around Stadium DJ, FIFA and Vivo. Additionally this needed to be achieved through digital channels only and without any media budget for paid measures.

Just like sports, music is a universal language and connects people worldwide. Music also plays a central role in the FIFA World Cup. Just like football it is highly emotional, connects humans around the world and creates fans that are passionate about their favourite artist.

With Stadium DJ we wanted to connect and activate fans around the globe and invite them to participate in a worldwide vote about which song would be played live in the Stadium in Moscow during the FIFA World Cup Final 2018. With this idea, we also wanted to re-engage fans, whose teams had already left the tournament and enable a second competition that was driven by the fan's loyalty and engagement to help their favourite artist win. For the fans, the active participation helped them to feel connected to the Final Match which helped FIFA to increase their audience and therefore their sponsor's stage.

The target audience defined were all global football fans & music fans of all ages.

Stadium DJ leveraged the concept of activating fanbases for a rare opportunity: Their song would be played at the world’s biggest sports event to a global audience of over 1 billion people watching live.

Creating a competition of communities around the topic of music, combined with the momentum of the FIFA World Cup Final, would create worldwide fan engagement. Specific digital channels would enable this campaign to spread rapidly through hashtags and sharing functionalities.

Approaching fans on the digital channels they frequently use would enable an immediate reaction, make the results measurable thus creating a strong competition where fans could impact their preferred artist’s life and influence the result directly. The call to action “Vote Now” and the short time to the final would encourage the target audience to participate immediately and effectively mobilize others.

We had 6 days to fully develop the concept and strategy, produce all creatives and prepare the digital channels. We released 13 animated posts on 5 different Social Media Platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram Stories, Weibo and VKontakte. The campaign was conducted in 3 languages: Russian, Chinese and English.

The campaign was divided into 2 stages. Initially fans were invited to nominate their favourite artist and song. During the second phase the most nominated 4 songs were available for voting through a specialized set of creatives on the various platforms. The winning songs per platform were played before, during and after the FIFA World Cup Final 2018.

The campaign was live from 29.06. until 09.07.2018 during which the fans were activated 2 - 3 times on the different platforms through clear calls to action.

Campaigns were monitored in real-time through a proprietary data tracking infrastructure to ensure maximum reach and engagement.

The campaign achieved a total reach of 74 Million Impressions, 2.4 Million Video Views and 12.6 Million Engagements during its run-time across all digital channels without the use of any media budget.

Within the platforms, Twitter demonstrated outstanding performance with 4.5 Million Votes within 24 hours, 523’000 Retweets and an Engagement Rate of 34.5%. The hashtag #FIFAStadiumDJ achieved the status of a worldwide trending hashtag and the Voting-Post ranks among the top 40 successful Tweets of all time. It also was the most successful Tweet ever published by FIFA.

Football and music fans were repeatedly activated. We also achieved significant awareness increases of the tournament in new target audiences. Finally, the results of the campaign validated a current global phenomena in the music industry: The rise of K-Pop Superbands. This initiative also proved FIFA’s ability to deliver innovative, high-performing campaigns to it’s sponsors worldwide.