Tati Lindenberg, chief marketing officer at Unilever Home Care, reflects on two campaigns it ran during Arsenal’s stand-out season.
Arsenal has been the club on everyone’s lips. From its first Premier League victory since 2004 to a near-miss at lifting the Champions League trophy, it has been a season of highs and lows. Off the pitch, this has been a golden year of marketing for long-standing partner Persil.
Across two major pieces of work (the Brazil-focused OMO Varzenal Cup and the women’s football campaign ‘It Starts Outside’), the Unilever brand used football culture to bring its long-running ‘Dirt Is Good’ platform to life in more emotional, local and participatory ways.
Speaking to The Drum, Tati Lindenberg, chief marketing officer at Unilever Home Care, reflects on what the partnership delivered over the past year, why Persil chose to focus on supporters and grassroots communities as much as elite players and how campaigns rooted in dirt, play and everyday football culture translated into stronger brand equity, higher engagement and commercial growth.
Persil has been a partner of Arsenal since 2023. Lindenberg says that the core ambition behind the work for the 2025/26 season was to tell stories that “go beyond the stories of the stars” and instead reflect the experiences, emotions and environments that football fans recognize in themselves.
According to Lindenberg, the partnership has increased awareness and understanding of the ‘Dirt Is Good’ platform, helping strengthen perceptions of the brand’s purpose and meaning. “The power of the brand has become stronger as people are aware of the partnership,” she explains.
A standout success has been the OMO Varzenal Cup, a content series following eight grassroots várzea football teams from Brazil as they compete for the chance to bring their story to London and play at the Emirates Stadium.
The campaign was inspired by the discovery that a number of grassroots Brazilian teams had named themselves Arsenal purely out of love for the club. “When we saw these communities and teams carrying the Arsenal name within Brazilian subcultures, we knew there was something authentic there,” Lindenberg explains.
To bring the project to life, Persil and Arsenal partnered with KondZilla, the multicultural YouTube platform with more than 67 million subscribers, creating a social-first content series rooted in Brazilian grassroots football culture.
Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum
The results were significant. The campaign generated more than 111m views globally, over 180,000 hours of watch time and completion rates 293% above KondZilla benchmarks. It also delivered 106% more engagements versus Arsenal partner benchmarks, while 92% of viewers said the brand felt culturally relevant.
For Lindenberg, the campaign succeeded because it reflected a world that already existed rather than trying to manufacture one around football marketing.
“There are millions of people who play grassroots football and only a percentage make it professionally, but if you flip it, almost every professional started there,” she says. “Players like Ian Wright are a clear example of that journey.”
The visual world of Varzenal was intentionally built around Brazilian favela and várzea football culture. “We wanted it to feel like grassroots football on a Sunday in Brazil,” Lindenberg explains. “There’s always a BBQ, dogs interrupting games, different rules and a very specific atmosphere. We always create that environment.”
In addition to Varzenal, Arsenal and Persil also launched ‘It Starts Outside,’ a campaign focused on the women’s game and the role outdoor play has in shaping footballers from childhood.
The campaign (see top of page) features real childhood images of players, including Chloe Kelly, Beth Mead and Steph Catley, playing outside in gardens, parks and streets. Players asked their parents to source photographs, which were then scanned and used throughout the campaign.
Lindenberg explains that the campaign was designed around nostalgia and relatability. “We do not only see the women’s team on the pitch, but also in environments where fans recognize themselves, in the garden, enjoying the outdoors and the realities of everyday life,” she says.
That focus on lived experience and recognizable environments has become central to Arsenal and Persil’s wider cultural marketing strategy.
Referring back to previous campaigns involving Bukayo Saka, Lindenberg says there were initial conversations around why the work did not center purely on football skills or traditional athlete storytelling. “We try not to just tell the story of the players, but the stories of the supporters,” she explains. “The aim is always to create campaigns that viewers can see themselves in.”
Collaboration has also been critical to the campaign’s reach and resonance. Across the work, Arsenal and Persil have partnered with creators and communities, including KondZilla, Rising Ballers, Arsenal’s own social channels and ambassador Ian Wright.
According to Lindenberg, the strategy is always to work with people and platforms already embedded within culture and fandom spaces. “Everything relating to Arsenal tends to be social-first or social by design,” she says.
That approach has also translated commercially. Unilever found that 50% of consumers aware of the Arsenal partnership said they were using Persil more often, with usage increasing by up to 13%. Lindenberg added that the campaigns have driven “better brand equity, perception and also more sales volume,” while helping audiences create “higher affinity with ‘Dirt Is Good’ in general.”
For Persil, the lesson from the season is that the most effective sports partnerships are not always the ones that place brands closest to elite performance. Sometimes, they work best when they move in the opposite direction: toward the grassroots, the fans, the childhood memories and the messy realities that make people fall in love with the game in the first place.