For marketers adrift in a sea of media fragmentation, sports have remained a dependable — if pricey — anchor, representing certainly one of the few remaining pillars of monoculture. Look no further than the Super Bowl, which continues to attract record rankings and diverse audiences on linear TV despite the acceleration of cord-cutting.
That said, sports are as dynamic and fast-changing as other content types, and deep-pocketed firms like Unilever are adjusting their marketing strategies to acknowledge growing digital- and social-first consumption habits. The CPG giant’s broad spend on U.S. sports marketing nearly doubled between 2024 and this yr, with further activity planned for 2026.
As a part of its sponsorship of FIFA World Cup 26, as an example, Unilever’s Dove Men+Care personal care brand recently launched a campaign wherein former NFL player Marshawn Lynch attends a “super fan training camp” with U.S. soccer star Trinity Rodman, bridging two different interpretations of football with humor. The effort, running totally on Meta and TikTok, promotes a sweepstakes to secure tickets to the highly coveted tournament, which can be played across North America starting in June.
“In principle, this is the largest spectator event in all of history,” said Ryu Yokoi, chief media and marketing capabilities officer of Unilever personal care and North America, of the World Cup.
Unilever sees occasions just like the World Cup as emblematic of a bigger shift from one-to-many broadcast marketing — historically, a bedrock for CPGs — to “many-to-many” marketing that may reach fans in any respect levels and occasions. Unilever’s broad mandate is to construct “desire at scale” for its brands, that are battling aspects like price-sensitive consumers and upstart CPG disruptors, all while their parent company undergoes a wide-ranging restructuring. CEO Fernando Fernandez in March stated Unilever would allocate half of its total ad spend to social media while increasing work with influencers 20 fold. Many of those tactics are already apparent in how the CPG tackles a diversifying field of sports marketing.
“There are few things that carry this sort of focused attention, where so many are watching, and yet also the pockets are there when it comes to cohorts, communities inside it which might be having fun with and fascinating with [sports] from different angles,” said Yokoi, describing sports as an “ever-more necessary play.”
Social-first sports marketing
Unilever has invested in sports sponsorships for years but has been stepping up its presence in ways large and small to attach with different consumer groups and reap the benefits of evolving digital capabilities.
Hellmann’s made its Super Bowl debut in 2021 in what Yokoi described as a step-change moment, while Dove has appeared on the last two big games to advertise messages around body confidence and keeping young girls involved in sports. Those are tentpole promoting opportunities — 30 seconds of Super Bowl airtime can command price tags over $7 million — but it surely is work that is increasingly supported by a gentle clip of social and digitally oriented activations.
Take Hellmann’s, which has capitalized on viral moments like Tennessee Titans quarterback Will Levis boasting of putting mayonnaise in his coffee. Hellmann’s quickly formed a long-term partnership with the NFL athlete that has featured every thing from a mock press conference addressing Levis’ unusual beverage routine to a “parfum de mayonnaise” gag fragrance and accompanying faux-luxury campaign.
The social-first mandate extends to user-generated content as well. For its sponsorship of the 2025 U.S. Open, Dove put out the decision for an “underarm ambassador” to create TikTok content across the tennis tournament and promote antiperspirant products, highlighting a typically unglamorous a part of the body. The U.S. Open activation echoed a bigger platform where Dove has sought to bring fresh hygiene to events where sweating and B.O. runs rampant, like comic-book conventions and music festivals.
Unilever doesn’t have a selected criteria for when to leap on trending social moments, in keeping with Yokoi, but as an alternative tries to situate those opportunities inside its “brandverse,” or the way in which it maps brands onto stories that amplify specific product values and characteristics. If the social play might be prolonged into other channels like experiential marketing, all the higher.
“One of the things we’ve been experimenting with increasingly that we love is this concept of blending social and IRL moments,” said Yokoi. “We find that that could be a real accelerator for this many-to-many idea.”
Bridging brand constructing and performance
The gravitation of sports to streaming is also attracting more investment from Unilever because it looks to tie marketing closer to conversions, or what Yokoi called a “culture to cart” strategy. Unilever was an early partner with Amazon on audience-based creative tools that allow brands like Dove to raised tailor ads to households based on geographic, demographic and behavioral data.
Amazon’s ability to wed retail media muscle to an expanding slate of premium sports content, including NFL “Thursday Night Football” and regular-season NBA Games, has given it a first-mover advantage and helped propel massive growth for its promoting business. The approach is being replicated elsewhere in retail through deals like Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio, which is able to increase the big-box store’s promoting screen presence.
“Streaming has opened up a full digital playbook for us in what was once a linear transmission,” said Yokoi.
Despite the emphasis on performance marketing tactics, Unilever is preserving a commitment to purpose-driven messaging at the highest of the funnel, including during moments just like the Super Bowl. For the large game this yr, Dove ran a spot highlighting what number of young girls abandon sports due an absence of body confidence, a difficulty the non-public care brand has tried to combat for a long time. The heart-tugging business scored accolades for its emotional impact, but in addition reached incremental audiences, reminiscent of dads who function coaches for youth leagues.
“We have to have a look at each the short-term and the long-term impacts of these things when it comes to the equity that we’re constructing and in addition, within the short term, the actual drive to sale that’s happening in those windows,” said Yokoi. “We generate a ton of merchandising around these events and it’s really necessary that we sell through for our customers, our customers being the retailers.”
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