AXE’s message to the male 16-30 demographic has always been about attracting girls in the “mating game.” This became a challenge during the month of the World Cup, a time when most guys simply want to stay home and watch games without having to worry about attracting girls. Axe needed to figure out a way to generate engagement with its fans on social media without betraying its “mating game” equity.

We used the Sysomos MAP platform to research soccer-related conversations and discovered that women talked about the attractiveness of elite soccer superstars almost as often as our target commented on the game itself.

This inspired a creative concept called “During the World Cup You’ll Need Us More than Ever,” which intended to convince guys that Axe’s power of attraction was more important than ever during the World Cup. The reason was simple: while guys watch the games, women are watching the players, and raising their standards of male attractiveness in the process.

Most of our content throughout the month was crowdsourced from women on social media. We monitored their conversations during live matches, and turned the best ones into art that were posted on our accounts with credit to the original authors.

By transforming women into spokespersons for AXE, we were able to generate uniquely relevant content, maintaining our target connection with the brand.

We took the unorthodox approach of taking Axe’s message directly to women who were already commenting about the attractiveness of players. We used their own words and tweets to create content that was easy and fun to share. We also created original art and copy specifically designed for each day’s matches, highlighting the “most attractive players” before teams took to the field. Suddenly, women who never engaged with the brand before were tagging their boyfriends, directing guys’ attention away from the sporting event and towards the individuals who were raising the standards of male attractiveness as they played.

Axe does not speak about sports, it speaks about seduction. Yet during the month of the World Cup, Axe managed to stay relevant and generate powerful interactions with its target audience by joining in the conversation from a different angle. Rather than attempt to speak about sports, we spoke about the athletes in terms that are extremely relevant both to the brand’s identity and to the target audience.

• 2,337,825 daily total reach

• 8,428,427 impressions during the month.

• Social media mentions increased by over 400%

• Twitter: 23.4K organic impressions during the World Cup; 240% increase in interactions.