Ad of the Day: Powerade showcases cinematic ‘power’ in leadup to World Cup
Sports drink Powerade continues it’s 'That’s Some Kind of Power' TV campaign with a soccer-themed commercial leading up to this year’s Fifa World Cup. This time, it plays out like a work of classic cinema.
Like the previous campaign aimed for the NCAA crowd for March Madness, this spot was created by Wieden+Kennedy and focuses on a bodega owner with a very vivid imagination. This time around, looking back on his youth, the man says that if he had “that kind of power,” his soccer stardom would have reached cinematic levels. Gliding under defenders, causing the collective stadium to gasp as he pulls off a Pele-esque bicycle kick to score the winning goal.
Jason McAlpin, senior brand manager for Powerade, spoke of the slightly different approach, saying: “Even if you're not soccer fan, everyone has a favorite movie. So that was a kind of a quick device, but also movies in nature are more often than not fictional and a kind of hyperbolic or extreme depictions of moving real time events are real-life events. So it parallels very well with the core idea.”
These spots will air exclusively on Fox, the tournament’s English-language broadcast partner. But, as the audience for the World Cup skews Hispanic, a similar 30-second spot was created in Spanish for placement on Telemundo, the Spanish-language partner for the Fifa coverage.
McAlpin added: “We wanted to find true authenticity, in the language and the dialect and we can't shortchange that importance. So we actually went with a native speaker to deliver the monologue, but it's really going to be a very, very similar person in that style and extremely relatable to what you've seen so far.”
