Hasta La Creative!

What did FIFA World Cup sponsors get out of their association with the global event? In some cases it’s obvious, as various video campaigns created for the tournament have racked up hundreds of millions of views. But then again, many of those views actually went to non-sponsors: Nike, not an official sponsor of the tournament itself, soundly defeated sponsor Adidas by that measure. So, as the dust settles, we’re taking a look at another measure of success: the growth in the brands’ social-media communities.

For this chart, Ad Age worked with ListenFirst, a New York social analytics and strategy shop, to examine the growth in Facebook fans, YouTube subscribers and Twitter and Instagram followers among the big brands that backed the 2014 World Cup. Scroll down below the graphic for more notes and context.

ListenFirst tracked both absolute and relative growth. First, it monitored each brand’s average social-community growth before the World Cup to establish as a baseline. Then the ListenFirst team measured how brands grew their social followings during the tournament relative to their usual, pre-World Cup growth rate to arrive at the weighted scores you see in our chart.

Continue reading at AdAge.com