Experiment with formats / Cleaning products and podcasting don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but Cif found a way to insert itself into a highly lucrative industry with an idea that clearly links back to its product. As Stephanie Chan, YouTube’s strategic partner manager, stated at SXSW 2025, YouTube currently reaches 1 billion monthly podcast viewers, with 84% of Gen Z listeners discovering new shows through the platform. What brand wouldn’t want a piece of this young, highly engaged audience?
‘We’re leveraging the growing influence of podcasts in Brazil as a key media platform to expand our reach [and embed] our core brand messages in a lighthearted and spontaneous way,’ says Mariana Gonçalo, marketing director at Unilever. It’s much more interesting than Cif telling you how many surfaces its Miracle Clean product works on, and it gets the brand in front of a mass audience without ruining the podcast experience.
Level up a sponsorship / The campaign is framed as a helpful service to prevent podcasters from getting demonetised for explicit language, but really it’s a creative way to sneak a load of Cif ads into content that people actually want to watch. It’s a pretty seamless mechanic – everyone is familiar with the standardised bleep that censors swearwords, and the idea lands without needing much explanation.
There are lots of creative ways to integrate a sponsorship in a way that highlights your product or service without disrupting the experience – we like this jersey sponsorship from home appliances brand Consul, which ‘cleaned’ a Brazilian football team’s shirt free of sponsors (many clubs plaster their shirts with sponsors, which mars the beauty of the jersey design and angers fans) and led to a 12% sales increase.
