Nike, Hyundai, ESPN Leveraging World Cup for Increased Buzz

According to Adweek, Nike has continued to leverage their World Cup commercial, "Write the Future" to generate an increase in the amount of buzz about their brand. Again, they have been able to do this without the expensive need to actually sponsor the World Cup.

Table is from Adweek.com.

It's interesting to surmise whether Nike is interesting in continuing trying to leverage the ad, or if it's now just riding a wave on the downhill side of the curve. With just 4 teams left, and the U.S. eliminated more than 10 days ago, buzz for the entire event has scaled back to the soccer enthusiasts and interested Germans, Uruguayans, Spanish and Dutch.

The most pain next week will come in meeting rooms at both the ad agencies and social media firms hired by Adidas. What would otherwise be an impressive showing and reason to celebrate must have come at a price exponentially higher than the price paid by Nike.

If you aren't one of the 18,000,000 people to have seen the 3:00 version of the ad, which Nike cleverly launched on YouTube first, check it out here: