Brand spending on sports sponsorship is rising, but tracking the impact of those sponsorships is an increasingly heavy burden for the marketers tasked with getting the most out of their dollars. When a brand is active in multiple sports with different fan cultures, media footprints and cultural gravity wells, tracking their impact becomes even harder.
Enter Unilever. Dirt Is Good, Unilever’s internal cross-market bracket for its fabric detergent brands Persil, Omo and Skip, recently swerved into motorsports via its sponsorship of F1 Academy, the all-female offshoot of Formula One launched just three years ago. The umbrella brand has sponsored Arsenal as the soccer club’s “official fabric care partner” since 2023.
Though the season is already underway, the brand’s involvement with the F1 Academy begins at the Dutch Grand Prix, held August 21, where its branded car livery, borne by driver and brand ambassador Zoe Florescu, will debut alongside a campaign backed by paid media and the involvement of Usain Bolt. The idea, according to Giovanna Bressane Gomes, global vp, and head of fabric cleaning at parent company Unilever, is to increase consideration and purchase intent among suburban families — and associate its products with speed and high performance.
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