It's been less than a week since Germany were crowned World Champions in Brazil. Can you remember any of the adverts though?!

 Preparation

 Adidas' 6 month Pre-Planned Campaign 

"We want to be the most talked-about brand at World Cup," says Tom Ramsden, brand marketing director for Adidas Football, who oversees communications across advertising, PR, social and retail. "We knew we were going to do something real-time, that isn't completely brand new to us, but it is at this scale."

"The spin-off would be to be the most talked about in terms of how much traffic you can drive to retail, use of things like the hashtag and everything else," Mr. Ramsden adds. "But that simple goal is what is keeping the train on the tracks."

We Are Social has been flying across the globe to gather content on over 100 Adidas players that can be assembled on the fly regardless of who wins. This information was collected into a "Content Bible" of 1,000 images and 160 videos primed for use in reaction to game play, "It's basically spread betting," Mr. Ramsden added.

 Nike's sponsored teams and players had a relatively unsuccessful World Cup performance in comparison to Adidas, but despite this it's World Cup campaign continues to raise the bar in engagement. Their “Risk Everything” campaign, which consists of several videos, have had over 400 million views, and over 23.05 million actual engagements. The brand’s Pixar-styled “The Last Game” animated short  leads the way with around 65 million views.

 That Semi Final


It'll be hard to look back on this World Cup without mentioning the collapse on Brazil in their own backyard. It became the most talked about sporting event in the history of twitter racking up an impressive 35.6m tweets mentioning either #BRA or #GER. This smashed the Superbowl's previous record of 24.9 million tweets.


 As a result brands took advantage of this opportunity in a variety of ways. From mocking to congratulating, below of some of the stand out responses.

The Suarez Bite

 Were brands prepared for this incident or just responding in real time?

McDonald's, Nando's, BetFair, Listerine and Trident all used tongue in cheek adverts on social media and print.


However, it was Adidas's response which stood out. As oppose to jumping on the trend, they dropped Suarez from all World Cup marketing activities. "“Adidas certainly does not condone Luis Suarez’s recent behaviour and we will again be reminding him of the high standards we expect from our players. We have no plan to use Suarez for any additional marketing activities during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.”

 Adidas's prominent role as a World Cup sponsor meant they didn't have to use this incident to raise brand awareness like many other brands did. They instead showed a responsible approach and limited long term damage to the brand.

 Endorsement

 With such a huge event looming and so much potential coverage, brands often associate themselves with potential stars. This can make it even harder to stand out? Yet mischief makers Paddy Power once against went against the grain. They managed to sign up Paul Scholes exclusively to front their World Cup campaign.

 They started in October 2013 by asking "who would NEVER work for Paddy Power?".

 "The company wanted someone to provide genuine insight to readers in this disruptive media landscape. Somebody who was really exclusive. Somebody who hadn’t done the rounds on the TV sofas" said Paul Mallon, editorial manager for Paddy Power.

 "The results of this content deal have been exceptional. In terms of social media, our #AskScholes hashtag was trending organically for more than two hours with more than 30m potential impressions. These things normally get messy on Twitter (and they did with ludicrous questions) but we were confident Scholes’ clever answers would disarm any doubters." Paul added.

Failures

 Obviously there was always going to be a couple of fails! 
Samsung wished American legend Landon Donovan "Good Luck" in a tweet, but weren't aware that he'd been dropped. Awkward. While Delta Airlines presumed Ghana has giraffes, incorrect. Finally, KLM probably has a few less customer after making a sly dig to Mexico going out to Netherlands, what happened to winning with class eh?!
 


Worth a Mention:
Peperami's use of vines were brilliant, remaining consistent to their brand personality while still relating to each country involved; https://vine.co/u/1079477031433039872