As World Cup action heats up, the tournament’s July 19 final is not the only date circled on soccer fans’ calendars: Major League Soccer will return on July 16, with all teams hitting the field on July 22. Timed to the increased engagement around soccer at all levels is a new campaign from Procter & Gamble’s Febreze, according to details shared with Marketing Dive.
“Can’t Wash This” is built around the insight that with the increased attention around soccer — whether consumers are watching World Cup or MLS games on TV or playing in youth leagues — comes more gear, cars and soft surfaces that pick up odor but can’t go in the wash.
Enter Febreze, which became the official odor fighter of MLS this year as part of P&G’s larger partnership with the league. The effort sees the brand seeking cultural relevance for a product, Febreze Fabric Refresher, which was introduced in 1998. Finding such relevance hasn’t always been easy, explained Tyler Beck, vice president of North American air care at P&G.
“Soccer gives us a cultural entry point that feels timely and ownable, but we didn't want to show up in the same way that every brand does,” the executive said. “Instead of focusing on the polished aspect of the sport, we leaned into something that's real.”
Febreze’s new campaign includes a podcast integration, an experiential push, an artist collaboration and creator content. The brand is also refreshing the boot rooms of MLS clubs LA Galaxy, FC Cincinnati, Red Bulls New York and Atlanta United FC, during which the teams will shoot behind-the-scenes content.
“One of the things that we see across our media mix is Febreze is such an experiential brand,” Beck said. “We're on radio and streaming, but we find that when you can visualize the experience and then also take it experientially to these cities, that's where the brand can breathe better.”
As part of the campaign, Febreze has teamed with “What Now? with Trevor Noah” for integrated content around the podcast’s World Cup coverage. Noah, the former host of “The Daily Show,” filmed video content inside the actual boot room of the Red Bulls New York, the first time the podcast has left the studio for a brand integration.
“We didn't give [Noah] a very strong brief. We said, ‘This is what we're doing. What do you think?’ and he came up with the ideas and integrations,” said Esra Yeksek, senior communications manager at P&G. “Trevor was like… ‘I'm not doing it for an ad, I'm doing it because I feel passionate about the space, and I resonate with this consumer truth.’”
Engaging with culture through creators
The brand has also teamed with multidisciplinary artist Temi Coker on scent-inspired boot designs and a boot room installation as part of the Febreze Boot Room Tour experience that will help consumers engage with the brand in Los Angeles,New York, Cincinnati, Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, from July 17 to Aug. 29.
Coker, a Nigerian-born artist known for color-saturated visual work, gives the campaign a way to connect with consumers around design and soccer culture. Febreze overindexes, perhaps more than any other P&G brand, with the multicultural consumer, particularly African-American and U.S. Hispanics, who are spending 25% more on scent than other consumer cohorts in the U.S., according to Beck.
“You have this love-group for the brand, and you have this emerging, exploding demographic within soccer that has gone relatively unknown and uncaught… so we thought it was a great partnership to bring Temi,” the executive said.
As part of the campaign, creator content will show how the pro boot room experience can be translated to consumer homes. Because Febreze targets scent, the product provides a particular challenge in demonstrating its utility in creator content, leading the brand to work with visualists including miniature artists, makeup artists and special effects artists. The brand has also branched out to college athletes through NIL deals.
The embrace of creators meets industry-wide trends and comes as P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard has spoken about how evolving expert voices are part of a new epoch of marketing marked by media fragmentation, digital commerce and the rise of artificial intelligence.
“This whole historical precedent of using our scale and our rates to blast TV everywhere, that's [not] how we're going to win a brand new space,” Beck said. “We're going to feel comfortable with leveraging our consumer groups to tell our story instead. This campaign is a perfect representation of us embracing that.”
