Ferrero North America is planning to spend more than $100 million on marketing campaigns tied to the Super Bowl and World Cup next year.
The sports push comes as the confectioner’s parent company drives further into the United States through acquisitions and investments in domestic production. Ferrero, which was founded in Italy but is now based in Luxembourg, entered North America nearly a half century ago, but the company only really started investing in the market over the past decade.
In July, Ferrero bought cereal maker WK Kellogg for $3.1 billion, the latest in a deal spree that included snapping up Nestle’s U.S. candy business and Halo Top owner Wells Enterprises.
The Nutella owner, which just started its fiscal 2026 in September, is preparing itself for its biggest year yet in the U.S., where it is the third-largest candy company, trailing only Hershey and Mars. Its privately held parent company saw an 8.9% increase in turnover — or revenue — in the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2024, Ferrero disclosed in its most recent financial data. In the past year, Ferrero USA has seen dollar sales grow 4.5%, outpacing the broader confectionery and cookie categories, according to the company.
“We want to do something big to kind of reintroduce ourselves to North America,” said Michael Lindsey, chief business officer of Ferrero North America.
Ferrero North America’s bet on sports will kick off in February with the company’s first-ever Super Bowl ad, which will star Kinder Bueno. Its sister company Ferrera has previously aired spots during the big game, including last year’s Nerds Gummy Clusters ad.
Then, starting in June, Ferrero North America is planning a slate of promotions around the World Cup. Ads for its products will play before or after the games and the company plans to push promotions tied to roughly two dozen of its brands.
“Why sports? It’s still the largest audience, especially if you want to reach live consumers with something that they’re actually going to sit down in front of a TV and watch,” Lindsey said. “Especially the Super Bowl, they watch TV with an intent to watch the commercials, which is a very unique situation today when you’re trying to reach consumers who are skipping past your ads or getting up to make a sandwich.”
Earlier this year, more than 127.7 million viewers tuned in to watch the NFL’s championship game, setting a record, according to Nielsen Media Research. All of those eyeballs can make it appealing for companies to pay the hefty price tag for airing a commercial during the game. Advertisers are reportedly paying as much as $8 million to Comcast‘s NBCUniversal for a 30-second spot during February’s match. In early September, NBCUniversal said it had already sold all of its Super Bowl ad spots.
And while football still reigns as the top sport for viewers in the U.S., soccer has been gaining ground. A reported 26 million U.S. viewers watched the 2022 World Cup final.
For the Super Bowl, all focus will be on Kinder Bueno, which has been sold stateside since 2019.
Ferrero chose to highlight the candy because it sees Kinder as “its most under-leveraged brand in the portfolio relative to its global success,” Lindsey said. Few Americans would guess that Kinder is the best-selling chocolate brand in the world, not Hershey or Nestle, according to Lindsey. Still, in a few years, Kinder has grown to become a more than $500 million brand in the U.S. for Ferrero, according the company.
Plus, last year, Ferrero opened its first-ever North American chocolate factory in Bloomington, Illinois, to manufacture Kinder products.
While the Super Bowl spot hasn’t been filmed yet, Lindsey said the commercial will coincide with a new dark-chocolate version of Kinder Bueno and a white chocolate iteration.
“[The Super Bowl] is just the perfect vehicle to drive a lot of trial all at once,” he said.
When the Super Bowl ad spot airs, the company said it will be the biggest marketing push by Ferrero ever, in any global market. But two months later, Ferrero plans to top that record with its World Cup promotions, which will kick off in April in North America. Almost every product across its portfolio will see its packaging shift as part of the campaign.
“We’re going all in: We’ll have one promotion and one set of packaging,” Lindsey said.
Customers will have to buy multiple products from across the portfolio to benefit from the promotion. The intention is to help consumers understand that Ferrero makes the breadth of products that they’re buying, from Nutella to Ferrero Rocher to Blue Bunny ice cream.
“It’s all very intentionally focused to drive trial from people who love one brand in the portfolio to become people who love the whole portfolio,” Lindsey said.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.
