Over a decade, Ted Lasso has gone from an NBC Sports ad character to an Apple TV show to FIFA 23.
EA Sports and Apple’s move to put Ted Lasso inside the FIFA 23 soccer video game won the Grand Prix for Brand Experience & Activation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Thursday.
The effort, created by both brands in-house, involved putting AFC Richmond, the fictional English team featured in the Emmy-winning Apple TV show “Ted Lasso,” into the video game. The brands built hype by teasing it on social media.
A launch film for the game featured real players and show characters, ending with Jason Sudeikis as his Lasso character in FIFA 23, voicing the well-known EA Sports catchphrase by saying, “I’m in the game.”
The campaign got no paid media but broke through via earned media coverage that included some 2,000 articles published globally, according to a case study of the effort from the brands, which noted that “for gamers to accept it, it couldn’t feel like an ad for the show, which meant no show branding.”
It resulted in 13.2 billion earned impressions in the first 30 days. And the fictional AFC Richmond club became the 17th most-played team in the game, out of 700 available teams, according to the case study.
Fans could quickly spot details such as Lasso’s navy v-neck, khakis and Nikes, Coach Beard and players from the show in the clip. (The Ted Lasso character first appeared in 2013 in ads for NBC Sports’ Premier League coverage.)
Gold winners in the category included:
