- Dove is using its official sponsorship of the FIFA World Cup to drive home a key message for the brand: helping girls build body confidence so they can stay in the game.
- The Game is Ours effort is based on insights that 1 in 2 girls quits sports after being criticized for their body type.
- The spot is centered on a new campaign film that encourages girls to celebrate their bodies and the joy of sports.
Brand Innovators caught up with Melissa Grevstad, head of brand purpose for Dove North America at Unilever to discuss the effort.
What is the strategy behind this new campaign?
At Dove, we continue to meet culture where it’s at with messages that are deeply connected to our brand purpose. From sports to music to entertainment, Dove is intentionally placing itself at the center of cultural moments that people care deeply about, where we believe we have something valuable to add. At the FIFA World Cup, we’re showing up on one of the world’s biggest sporting stages to celebrate girls’ joy, passion, and confidence in sport. We know girls are involved in the soccer world as players and fans, but too many of them choose to leave the sports they love because of body criticism. Dove research shows that 1 in 2 girls who quit sports are criticized for their body type, despite still loving the sports they play.
The campaign is anchored in our new film, The Game Is Ours, which brings the message that girls’ joy in sports should rise above criticism to life by using the real sounds of girls playing sports as the soundtrack of the film. As their movement and voices build, their joyful sounds rise above negativity and criticism, reinforcing the Dove mission to help girls feel confident enough to keep playing in the sports they love.
Beyond the film, the campaign extends across fan experiences, partnerships, and storytelling activations throughout the tournament to help make girls’ voices and experiences more visible within soccer culture.
Why is it so important for you to be at the World Cup?
The FIFA World Cup is one of the largest and most influential cultural moments in the world, reaching millions of people across generations, countries and communities. For Dove, it represents an opportunity to bring visibility to an issue that deserves greater attention, but to spark more meaningful conversations around confidence, representation, and belonging in sports.
There’s something especially meaningful about showing up in the global spotlight surrounding the men’s game to advocate for girls in sports. As FIFA works toward its goal of reaching 60 million female players by 2027, we see this moment as an opportunity not just to encourage girls to enter sports, but to help ensure they feel confident enough to stay in them.
How does showing up in cultural moments like these help support your brand platform?
For over 20 years, Dove has worked to challenge narrow beauty standards and help young people build body confidence and self-esteem through initiatives like the Dove Self-Esteem Project. Showing up in cultural moments like the FIFA World Cup helps bring that long-standing mission into spaces where confidence, identity, and belonging are already being shaped in real time.
Our entry into sports has resonated because it brings the legitimacy of decades as a leader in body confidence into the growing cultural force of women’s sports, allowing Dove to participate in a way that feels emotionally meaningful, modern, and unmistakably Dove.
