Beats or lifting World Cup trophy with no sponsorship fees to FIFA

Dr Dre is definitely on fire. Apart from just selling his Beats business to Apple for a whopping 3bio USD figure, the company completed one of the most successful campaigns ever built 100% on the usage of celebrities, including some of the biggest names in the football game.

Far from deciding to become FIFA sponsor (which would have cost Beats not less than 60mioUSD a year), and thanks to its amazing capacity to attract top football players with little cash investment, the premium headphones brand put together its “Game before the game” campaign. The aim was very clear: to opportunistically link the brand to World Cup event and drive sales and awareness.

So it successfully recruited the likes of Neymar, Van Persie, Fabregas, Chicharito Hernández, Sturridge, Suárez, Sagna, Ferdinand, Götze, Schweinsteiger, Matuidi and Henry, not to mention big names from other sports such as Lebron James and Serena Williams. Then shot a commercial that has had already as much as 23,5mio views on Youtube and that helped Beats to strengthen its 60% market share and surpass sales of 1bio USD.

Followers on Twitter account grew 16% to almost 600,000 and Facebook likes reached 7,3mio during World Cup tournament. And if all of this was not enough, it had 2 tournament champions among its players roster, including scorer of winner goal Mario Götze. So a good reason to develop a gold special edition of Beats headphones and publicly release them to both World Cup champions –with the participation of yet another celebrity, Naomi Campbell-, and enjoy the last bit of great value for money publicity.

Sony may have managed to ban the players from using Beats headphones publicly during the event, to protect its position as legitimate FIFA sponsor and its own headphones business. But it was too late. It only resulted in even more publicity for new Apple business unit and in Beats symbolically winning the World Cup trophy thanks to a really smart usage of players’ image rights.

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