FIFA case study

10 million views generated for World Cup paid and organic content

Through savvy Meta ads strategising, we helped FIFA boost the popularity of its World Cup Magazine App, increasing engagement by 31% and generating 40,000+ downloads, while producing reams of high-quality content for regular publication across its social media pages.

Channels and deliverables

• Meta ads
• Content and production (video, animations and images)

The challenge

The Fédération internationale de football association (FIFA) is the international governing body of association, beach soccer and futsal.

FIFA was struggling with a lack of content to promote its 2022 World Cup Magazine app. It urgently needed to rethink its Meta ads strategy to generate as many last-minute downloads as possible—and that’s where we came in.

Not only that, but FIFA also recognised that it needed more plentiful and higher-quality content across its social media pages to promote the app even further and get its subscribers hyped for the tournament. It was time for some seriously intensive content production.

Of course, with daily matches and news across the competition breaking in real time, our briefing processes were, well, brief! Our turnaround times were short, often no more than a few hours.

The solution

Our approach to FIFA’s lack of content was twofold. We addressed not only FIFA’s urgent content production need, but also crafted a Meta ads strategy to generate downloads for its World Cup Magazine app.

Content production

FIFA was struggling to create high-quality content in real time for its social media campaigns. It was crying out for an agency with a strong idea of the types of content that both perform well and resonate with the kind of audience it was targeting.

As for us, well—it’s hard to think of a more inspiring event to create content for than the World Cup. We were spoilt for choice!

 We used:

• snippets of World Cup legends to create videos for organic social content
• gifs, interviews and screens from the app to create animated videos for use across paid and organic channels

The content was distributed across all of FIFA’s social media properties—not to mention those of players both past and present. These included Javier Zanetti, Peter Schmeichel—even Lionel Messi.

Our team created videos not only of FIFA legends but also to promote FIFA+, FIFA’s content hub containing full matches both from the 2022 World Cup and previous World Cups, as well as a vast back catalogue of other FIFA and World Cup–related content.

We also worked on FIFA’s official 2022 World Cup Magazine app, for which we created a range of assets for distribution across both organic socials and Meta ads.

Meta ads strategy

FIFA’s Meta ads strategy for promoting its World Cup Magazine app was a little patchy and surface-level, reflected in the poor rate of app downloads. This simply wasn’t befitting of such an impressive organisation, so we were over the moon to have the opportunity to help. (And it didn’t hurt that our team is populated by a high proportion of football fans, as well!)

The app, by its nature, would be relevant for only a limited period. That meant FIFA needed a channel that could get it in front of the target audience and generate downloads right away. At the same time, the app had been suspended on the Google Play Store, and Apple Search Ads was proving immensely costly. That’s why we decided that paid social was the best way forward.

Our performance marketing specialists put their heads together and ideated a multifaceted approach to the problem. We:

• adjusted ads by language to ensure relevance to each target audience
• set up app download campaigns and split them by iOS and Android
• used a decentralised structure to identify best-converting interests and audiences
• created separate campaigns for pre– and post–iOS 14 users for attribution purposes
• integrated all campaigns with MMP (AppsFlyer) for better attribution and post-install data
• used dynamic creative ads to enable Meta to optimise delivery for the best-performing versions in real time
• quickly identified the matchday programme to be one of the app’s most-used features, so devised a strategy to target users from the countries that were playing, and narrowed it down by football-related interests

The results

• 10 million views generated for organic content
• 1.5 million engagements generated
• 31% increase in engagement rate
• 40,000 downloads generated
• 750,000 content shares
• 74% reduction in CPI
• Average CPI of $0.70
• Average CPC of $0.08
• Average CPM of $0.61
• 50 million impressions generated from Meta ads

FIFA was delighted with our rapid turnaround and carefully refined strategy, which saw their somewhat floundering World Cup Magazine app explode in popularity—just in time for kickoff!

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