Image credit:The drum

Everyone covering Major League Soccer’s new campaign leads with Lionel Messi pulling on an Inter Miami jersey for the cameras. Radhika Duggal, chief marketing officer at MLS, keeps steering the conversation toward something less glamorous, however: the email that lands in a new fan’s inbox three weeks later.

The league unveiled ‘Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here’ on July 13, timed to catch fans between the Fifa World Cup semifinals and MLS’s season return on July 16 and 17. It is, by Duggal’s account, the most coordinated effort in league history, built around a roster of club owners and international stars and backed by a new Amazon Music cover of Can I Kick It?, produced by DJ Premier and sung by Samara Cyn. 15 of MLS’s 30 clubs built their own localized versions of the ad, each shot in January.

None of that, Duggal says, is the hard part. “There’s this sexy advertising with lots of stars, and I think that is so important,” she says, “but equally important is the fact that fandom is formed in this messy middle time period. 

“This is the moment of big awareness, but when do fans fall in love with us? Not when they just become aware. It’s when we consistently communicate with them about our product, about our incredible players, about their stories, about our clubs.”

That “messy middle” is where Duggal has spent most of her two and a half years at the league, well before this campaign had a name. She joined MLS in 2024 after 25 years in consumer products, healthcare and financial services, and one of her first projects was building a brand strategy from data, arriving at the idea that MLS’s edge over other entertainment options comes from a feeling of belonging that appears consistently in the league’s research, ahead of the product itself.

The campaign runs against three separate goals. Brand interest is measured quarterly through a third-party provider, viewership counts as a league-level goal, while ticket revenue and ticket data belong to the clubs. Behind all three sits an 18-month media mix model built with Ipsos to determine which channels affect each number, checked daily in a standup where Duggal’s team decides what to adjust if one falls short.

The clubs face the same challenge inside the stadium. 22 of them run ‘First Match On Us,’ a program offering free tickets to first-time attendees, built from a shared guide compiled from clubs that tried versions of it last season. Some hand new fans a scarf and point supporters’ groups toward them. All of them follow up digitally, introducing players, rivalries and storylines meant to convert a free ticket into a second, paid one.

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Duggal keeps the celebrity owners – among them Beckham at Inter Miami, Matthew McConaughey at Austin FC, Magic Johnson at LAFC and Kevin Durant at Philadelphia Union – out of that follow-up entirely. Their role stays confined to the advertising itself, with players featured first across the rest of the campaign. “We let consumers tell us what works and what doesn’t, because we shouldn’t guess,” she says of the testing behind the ad’s final cut.

Asked what other marketers might learn from a World Cup year, Duggal points past the ad again. “For a marketer, do the hard work week in and week out,” she says, “because that’s what makes fans.”

Culled from Thedrum

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