A paid advertising campaign for Coca-Cola during the World Cup

Project summary

We carefully crafted a digital advertising campaign to promote marketing material at peak game times and throughout the tournament.

Calvert 22 Foundation is a London-based not-for-profit organisation which focuses on promoting young creatives, displaying and developing the creative industries in the New East: Russia and eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Central Asia.

They joined forces with Coca-Cola to showcase the under-explored areas in Russia, during the FIFA World Cup to an international audience. They wanted to reflect its inclusivity and exposure to the highly multicultural creative youth market that will shape the world and, in just a few years time, will represent the majority of spending power.

The Calvert Journal wanted to help tell the story of some of the more unknown host cities in Russia, to bridge the gap between the West’s perception of Russia and the new wave of Russian youth and creativity emerging through the country.

This exciting, dynamic project presented a new vision and new image for Russia in partnership with Coca-Cola.

The objective

To raise brand awareness and increase the traffic to the website, engagement and following on social media.

A secondary objective of the campaign was to drive app downloads across the Apple and Android stores.

The campaigns drove traffic towards landing pages telling the story of the 11 host cities at the Russia Fifa World Cup through films, articles and special reports hosted on The Calvert Journal and travel apps.

The passion and creative energy focused on the change-makers and the youth generation in various circumstances trying to make the world a better place for everyone.

The strategy

The key message of the campaign was “Beyond the Game”, the intention was to showcase the cultural and creative side of Russia. Social media (particularly YouTube), Gmail and remarketing were the primary channels used to promote this PPC campaign.

A suite of adverts were created for each city and the ads were scheduled to run when matches were played in each city, making them more relevant and capture the attention of the audience.

Through a combination of interest and audience targeting we were able to show the ads to a highly engaged audience.

Reporting

The campaign ran for the entirety of the FIFA World Cup which was spread out over 5 weeks. The campaign progress and results were reported on a weekly basis.

The report focused on the progress of each individual channel including cost per click, average session duration, app downloads and total ad spend.

As the campaign progressed we saw continual improvement in performance as our ongoing optimisations helped make the campaign spend work harder.

The result

It was a pleasure to work on the campaign and to have the Beyond The Game project seen and engaged with by as wide an international audience as possible.

From the beginning, our objective was to help focus on the core target audiences and we planned and executed a structured, careful digital ad campaign that was results-driven and tailored week by week that was seen by millions of people across the world.