SheBelieves is a movement inspired and fostered by the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) and the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) to encourage young women and girls to reach their dreams, athletic and beyond.
USSF and Public Good partnered during Black History Month and Women’s History Month to achieve two main goals in support of SheBelieves:
These goals required an approach that balanced the ability to collect and analyze data with the need for an engagement that felt personally inspiring for readers to spark interaction. Public Good’s platform was perfectly positioned for success by meeting readers in moments of motivation. Our three core success factors - premium publisher partners, advanced AI contextual targeting, and premium interactive units - combined to ensure that we could both inspire action, and could also collect rich data for significant insights.
Our premium publisher partner network allowed us to serve units on trusted, reliable publications and optimize for performance. Through our advanced, proprietary AI contextual targeting, we went deeper than simple keyword matches to identify high-performing content across articles and topics. And we created our signature premium interactive units for the campaign: a quiz to learn what readers know about USWNT, and a poll to learn how readers feel about the team.
Since these interactive and educational Action Units were different from standard display ads, they required more nuance and research than traditional ads. For the quiz, Public Good needed to maximize engagement, information, and availability. Quiz questions had to be immediately intriguing so that readers would want to engage with the unit and find out the answer, and had to include information that represented U.S. Soccer in a responsible way. They also needed to provide valuable data that U.S. Soccer could use for future campaigns. Similarly, the poll required a question that would inspire readers to engage with it, represent U.S. Soccer, and give insights for future campaigns. And both units needed to do all these things - and tell the story of the USWNT - in a constrained space with strict character limitations. The units wove storytelling and action together, empowering readers to take action after answering the quiz or poll. Three available actions - visiting the SheBelieves webpage, SheBelieves cup event page, and SheBelieves Summit event page - drove awareness and participation.
The campaign ran in Q1-Q2 2024 in the Chicago and Atlanta DMAs. Through contextual delivery on major media sites and continuous data analysis, Public Good targeted content that was most effective for engaging readers interested in DEI and female empowerment who might not yet have been USWNT fans. Other optimizations included adjusting delivery ratios for mobile and desktop, revising quiz and poll questions, and updating the units for maximal performance in each DMA.
This campaign exceeded the campaign goals. Appearing in more than 84,000 relevant articles for a total of 4 million impressions, it drove engagement and awareness about the USWNT, increasing engagement rate by +6.78% and collecting responses from more than 12,000 readers (nearly 4,600 for the quiz and more than 8,000 for the poll).
Our campaign uncovered differences in knowledge and perception about the USWNT between Atlanta and Chicago audiences. Atlanta-based readers are more knowledgeable about the USWNT, presenting an opportunity for greater education among Chicago readers. Atlanta audiences also have a stronger appetite for learning about individual player stories. Just over half of all poll respondents said they don’t watch the USWNT, indicating that (1) our campaign reached nonsoccer fans (a goal for the USSF), and (2) the team has a great opportunity to grow its market to new audiences.
Optimizations made throughout the course of the campaign leveraged both creative types to gain these valuable insights about people’s knowledge and feelings for the USWNT, and Public Good’s AI-for-Good targeting effectively reached new audiences interested in DEI and related topics.
