“I’ve always had a love for football. Football brings a lot of people together and what’s I love about the game”. So, the Athletic Star, Usain Bolt, debuts in the latest video of Puma, which portrays him as the protagonist of a soccer training, open to the public, at Borussia Dortmund’s home.
The interest of the Olympic champion for the football world and his approach to this discipline has been rumored for some years. But nobody expected that this could really happen, considering it more a publicity stunt by Puma, his technical sponsor since the beginning of his career.
Instead, on 23 March 2018 Usain Bolt trained with the main team of Borussia Dortmund, ahead of 1,500 fans present at the field and more than 10,000 people connected live on Youtube, to watch this sporting event. Present at the training there were also many journalists, to whom Bolt confessed his love for this sport, the desire to try a new challenge and the dream of playing in a top club, perhaps winning the Champions League, despite the age is not in his favor.
It is not sure if this event was only a marketing stunt, anyway it has generated a lot of rumors in the environment, especially thanks to an accurate communication strategy.
The respective protagonists’ social pages recorded exorbitant numbers, suffice it to say that the training video, published on Borussia’s official page has reached 700,000 views in four days, despite the channel counts 287,000 subscribers. The contents published on the different Social profiles of Puma have reached millions of views, and a high number of interactions, thanks to the simple but effective hashtags #NewLevels and #BVBolt.
What Puma has managed to do, through this event, is to unite people with different interests, different passions, coming from all over the world into one big community. This shows how important it is today to be able to interact and communicate through these new digital platforms, seizing the opportunities they generate, leaving nothing to chance, but carefully planning precise marketing strategies.