Nike versus Adidas: Which brand won the World Cup?

Now that the World Cup is finally over, brand marketers hoping to dominate consumers’ attention during the tournament will be analyzing the performance of every channel, creative asset and dollar spent along the way — and feverishly trying to connect their choices to incremental sales growth.

There are some things they won’t have been able to control. Adidas and Nike began the World Cup sponsoring 26 of its participating teams, but following the exits of Nike-backed England and France, Adidas was gifted an invaluable opportunity in the form of an all-stripes final. The brand marked the occasion with a film dubbed “La Final” highlighting its sponsored stars Lamine Yamal and Lionel Messi.

“Nike produced one of the most talked-about campaigns of the summer, but Adidas owned many of the tournament’s defining moments,” said Kerry Bradley, svp, Horizon Sports & Experiences. “When your athletes, teams and products are woven into the biggest stages in sport, every touchpoint, from broadcast and social to retail, begins to compound.”

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‘We’re starting to wonder’: Ad industry chases AI value as usage outpaces proof

Every choice has a price and the bill always comes due. Marketers are only just starting to work out what theirs actually costs for AI. 

Laura Higgins had been at Dollar Shave Club for two months when she started paying attention to her AI bill. During her first month as the company’s new chief brand and innovation officer, she ran everything, from concepting ad campaigns to the routine back-and-forth of everyday questions, through the tools available to her — Claude, ChatGPT, Higgsfield and Gemini — without much thought for what it was costing. 

“I have no idea what that bill looks like,” she said of that early stretch, chalking it up to an experimental phase. It didn’t last. Within weeks, Higgins had built herself a rough triage system: cheaper tools like Gemini for simple tasks, heavier models reserved for work that actually needed them. The shift from unmetered exploration to token discipline — or figuring out, in her words, how not to “burn up my tokens” — took about a month. 

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