Messi doesn’t talk much. But, the way he plays does. When the rest of the world dives, he stays on his feet. He’s telling us that life has more in store for us if we just stay up. We transformed this into a message to the world – “Don’t go down.”

Instead of launching through normal channels, we launched on Messi’s FB page. Our message was meant to be “his voice,” so it needed to come from him. For a guy that doesn’t talk much, he’s saying something pretty profound. The spot ran digitally and on broadcast globally, including the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Gatorade was perceived as a powerful global soccer brand thanks to this connection with Messi (81 earned placements totaling over 384 million + impressions for an ad value of over $4.7 million).

But most importantly, Messi embraced the message, and now it has become his main social platform. For a guy that doesn’t talk much, he’s saying something pretty profound.

Social Results:

The most shared video ever on Messi’s Facebook page with 200k+ shares

25.5MM video views which surpassed our goal by 51%, 10MM in the first 3 days

82MM social impressions (surpassing our 50MM goal)

17.7k mentions of Gatorade in connection to Messi (2.5X higher than our goal)