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How Unilever detergent brand Persil measures sports sponsorship impact
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.
Front-of-shirt placements, the top of the pyramid for soccer sponsorships, typically cost £35-£60 million ($47-81 million) for a “big six” club such as Arsenal, according to analysis by Nielsen. Even “official partner” deals such as Unilever’s Arsenal team-up can represent major investments, although its partnership with the F1 Academy likely cost much less than signing up with the league champions. Gomes declined to share what the F1 partnership cost Unilever.
In this conversation, she explained exactly why Unilever had pursued the two sponsorships in recent years, how it measures (and contrasts) the impact of each one, and how it backs partnership activations with traditional paid media efforts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why sponsor the Formula 1 Academy?
It relates a lot to our brand proposition and positioning. Dirt Is Good has spent 20 years championing the idea that getting involved, getting hands-on, and getting dirty is part of growth and progress. The first partnership we did, starting in 2023, was a partnership with Arsenal including [the campaign] with Arsenal Women to challenge period stigma, tackling double standards and helping more women and girls to feel able to keep playing. The F1 Academy is an opportunity to extend that work into motorsport.
And from a more product-driven approach, Formula One is all about performance under pressure, and we have a product, the Wonder Wash Mix, which is all about that. So it’s also a way to illustrate our brand’s main deliverable.
What indicators do you monitor to track whether the sponsorships work?
We are not evaluating success simply through exposure. The question is whether the partnership strengthens what Dirt Is Good stands for, whether it makes the brand more meaningful and distinctive, and whether it increases future consideration and usage. That’s the framework we use to assess the long-term value of the partnership.
How are you tracking those indicators?
We look to brand lift studies. We look to brand equity studies. We measure penetration, market share, sales. We put all that together to understand if it’s having the intended uplift.
Since we started working with Arsenal, we’ve seen evidence of growing awareness of the partnership, from 11% to 16%; 80% of consumers say it improves their opinion about Persil, and almost 80% said it makes them more likely to buy and use the brand in the future.
That doesn’t mean each partnership gets measured exactly the same way, because they’re different sports and there are completely different ways of activating the brand, and there’s a different fan and audience base.
The F1 Academy sponsorship gets your logo out there. What else does it give Persil?
In Zandvoort [the site of the Dutch Grand Prix], we’ll also be celebrating our driver Zoe [Florescu] as an incoming talent and a woman in motorsports. We have a full campaign around it with Zoe and Usain Bolt… Both of them bring an element of performance under pressure. There’s [paid media elements] for TV, social and digital, and even influencers, and we expect to do lots of culture-led content to bring this to life.
How are you measuring the impact of creators?
The impact of influencers in driving purchase awareness and product discovery around the world is super relevant, and that is why Unilever has been embracing this type of brand activation at such a high intensity, especially with micro- and nano-influencers. In the case of partnerships we mix those with bigger influencers that correlate to soccer or F1.
For bigger influencers it’s all about impressions and reach, but with smaller influencers it’s more about the engagement they can generate towards your brand, and how [consumers] perceive the products, because they are usually close to their communities and faithful about what they believe about the product. So, as a whole, we’re [monitoring] not only awareness and reach, but also consideration and purchase intent.
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