QSR Brand Optimizes $10M+ Global Sports Campaign

One workstream featured live-action content with celebrity athletes filmed separately due to scheduling, creating added production complexity across stills and video. The second used a mixed-media approach, combining live action and animation.

APR has worked with this brand on a retainer basis for over 10 years, serving as a trusted advisor that sits alongside the US marketing and production operations teams. Since 2022, APR has also worked with the brand's global team, a separate entity, whenever a major initiative comes up. This World Cup campaign was one of those moments, and it became bigger and more complex than prior global efforts.

The brand's primary objective was to drive brand relevance and guest traffic by positioning itself as an industry leader.

Problem

A campaign of this scale carries an enormous number of moving parts, and several factors made it especially demanding:

• Massive stakeholder complexity. The work involved 15 brand stakeholders across US, global, Canada, and Mexico, all providing input into a single body of work.
• High-stakes talent logistics. Eight celebrities were involved, some of them active players engaged during FIFA trading. That meant constant questions about who was available and which team they would be on, multiplying the usual challenges of a celebrity shoot.
• Significant security demands. Filming required sourcing and closing down public locations across Europe, which in turn required substantial security measures because of the players involved.
• A governance gap on the global side. The global team manages this type of work less often than the US team and lacks the equivalent governance, rigor, and dedicated production operations staff.
• Budget tension between teams. Operating under separate budgets with differing expectations created funding ambiguities. A primary challenge was defining cost allocation.
• Ongoing scope creep. Deliverables kept being added throughout the project. A 90-second trailer was added, and additional deliverables were added to meet  specific market needs.

‍

Solution

Thanks to APR's long-standing and trusted relationship with the brand, the global team brought APR in early, before creative concepts were locked. That upstream position allowed APR to shape the work and protect the investment from the outset.

→ Upstream involvement and IP protection.

APR was part of the team reviewing talent contracts and other IP before concepts were finalized. APR worked with teams across all the agencies to ensure assets were not misused, including making sure the celebrities posting on their own social channels used the right assets with the right clearances.

→ Mediating between global and US.

APR effectively served as a strategic intermediary between the two teams. Sitting in the US while holding the relationship with global, APR managed the expectations each team held against their respective budgets and worked to keep both sides aligned.

→ Filling the governance and production ops gap.

‍Because the global team lacked the same rigor, governance, and dedicated production operations resources as the US team, APR stepped into that role. APR helped manage the entire process and the entire financial budget, including full actualization of agency costs, working with finance to ensure all costs, even those unrelated to production, were managed and stayed within budget.

→ Leveraging the hive.

APR drew on its global team of experts to support the work end to end. APR had two lead Advisors working on the campaign with support from regional and discipline leads across the globe.

→ Streamlining production where possible.

The shoot was well planned, with the lead creative agency and the partner agency working collaboratively. Where possible, APR and the agencies streamlined production to manage modularity, end tags, and stakeholder approvals across global and US needs.

‍

The campaign achieved high-value organic engagement, evidenced by social media content.The team successfully made production decisions that protected the budget.

Results

The campaign launched with a large amount of social tease and pre-buzz, and the production delivered at remarkable scale:

• 18 original TVC commercials produced
• 70 social videos created
• 3 shoot locations over 9 days 
• Over 500 assets delivered in total, including still key visuals, retail, and PR

The work was produced in various European locations over the course of a month and had dedicated security for high-profile talent, and complex modularity to satisfy both global and US requirements. Despite the complexity and the deliverables that were added along the way, the campaign came together as a single coordinated effort across multiple markets.

‍

‍