As one of the world's most popular coffee brands, Nescafé has been an integral part of daily routines for nearly a century. Supported by Nestlé's heritage of innovation and quality, Nescafé continues to empower people to start the day strong and stay driven. In West Africa, Nescafé serves as a fuel for the daily hustle, connecting deeply with ambitious individuals driven by success.

To elevate its presence at a premier regional event, Nescafé partnered with Publicis West Africa and Eskimi to launch a high-stakes campaign for the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). 

As Ato Dadson, Regional Digital Media Strategist for Nestlé at Publicis West Africa, shared:

For Nestlé, where cultural relevance, reach, engagement, and brand safety are all important, Eskimi has been a strong partner in helping us activate around key moments while still maintaining quality delivery.

The challenge was not only to achieve scale across Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria, but also to ensure the brand appeared in contextual, brand-safe environments aligned with football passion, daily routines, and lifestyle culture.

Tapping into the biggest cultural moment

AFCON is one of the continent's most powerful cultural moments, bringing together millions of passionate fans across Africa and beyond. For brands like Nescafé, AFCON represented a unique opportunity to connect with consumers at the intersection of passion, energy, and everyday ritual. 

The activation also aligned with Nescafé's broader communication strategy, balancing both always-on visibility and seasonal cultural relevance.

Always-on campaigns help maintain brand presence and consistency, while seasonal campaigns allow us to create stronger cultural connections during key moments. Eskimi helped bridge both approaches by enabling us to align with ongoing consumer interests while scaling quickly during major cultural moments like AFCON, said Ato Dadson.

However, AFCON's fast-moving digital environment also created an intensely competitive landscape for attention. With audiences constantly engaging with live updates, social commentary, highlights, and trending content, traditional advertising formats could easily get lost in the noise.

For Nestlé, the challenge was not only to reach consumers, but to reach them at the right moments.

Nestlé operates across highly competitive categories where consumer attention is constantly divided across multiple platforms, brands, and content environments. One of the key challenges is not just reaching consumers, but reaching them in moments where they are most receptive to the brand message, shared Ato Dadson.

To truly resonate during AFCON, the campaign needed to move beyond passive visibility and tap directly into the cultural momentum, while maintaining contextual relevance, local authenticity, and brand safety across multiple markets simultaneously.

Nestlé campaigns often need to run across multiple countries, each with its own cultural nuances, media consumption patterns, and audience behaviors. Campaigns must be consistent enough to protect the brand, while remaining flexible enough to feel locally relevant, added Ato Dadson.

Contextual intelligence with DeepContext

The AI-driven DeepContext solution was selected to align Nescafé with culturally relevant moments during AFCON. 

DeepContext allowed us to align with relevant content environments in real time, helping the brand show up in moments where the audience was already emotionally invested. This was important because AFCON conversations were happening across multiple publishers, articles, and content types, not just on social platforms, shared Ato Dadson.

The campaign strategically placed messaging within football-related content, lifestyle environments, dining experiences, and fan conversations to naturally integrate the brand into football culture.

Key contextual signals included:

• Morning rituals: targeting news, lifestyle, and productivity content
• Tournament hype: content where fan engagement is highest.
• Urban lifestyle: street food, dining, and local urban culture.
• Brand Safety: filtering out negative sports narratives.

The AFCON campaign showed that when media, creative, and context are properly aligned, the campaign experience becomes stronger, added Ato Dadson.

Creative formats for fan participation

To stand out during the high-energy AFCON season, the campaign needed not only visibility but also interaction. Eskimi and Publicis selected Rich Media designed to match the excitement, transforming standard ads into interactive fan experiences.

Rich media also helped Nescafé stand out from standard display formats. It created a more memorable brand experience that allowed the campaign to feel more dynamic during the tournament, said Ato Dadson.

At the center of the creative strategy was a poll that invited users to predict match outcomes through a simple one-tap interaction. Because football fans naturally have strong opinions about tournament fixtures, the format felt highly engaging.

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The campaign also incorporated gamified Rich Media experiences, helping create a more memorable brand presence throughout the tournament. 

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Creative collaboration with Eskimi played an important role in bringing the idea to life. As Ato Dadson shared:

What stood out in the collaboration was Eskimi's role beyond execution. They helped translate the campaign idea into an interactive experience that balanced creativity, usability, and cultural relevance, shared Ato Dadson.

Turning cultural relevance into impact

Throughout the AFCON campaign, Nescafé delivered more than 13 million impressions, reaching 4.6 million unique users across Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria.

A part of the campaign was activated through Eskimi's DeepContext solution, which delivered ads across 22,275 highly specific URLs, prioritizing only relevant environments. 

DeepContext delivered a 50% higher CTR than in a non-contextual environment, demonstrating the power of culturally relevant content.

The solution also gave us a stronger layer of control around brand suitability and relevance. Rather than targeting people only based on demographic signals, DeepContext helped us target the right content moments, making the campaign feel more timely and connected to the tournament, said Ato Dadson.

The campaign also maintained strong levels of brand suitability by prioritizing premium and neutral-sentiment content, while actively avoiding negative or unsafe environments.

For Nescafé, this was particularly useful because the brand wanted to be part of the energy around AFCON while still maintaining a safe, premium, and contextually relevant advertising environment, added Ato Dadson.

Brand safety distribution remained consistently strong across all 3 countries, with an average performance of 95%. 

The Nescafé AFCON campaign demonstrated how contextual targeting helped align the brand with football passion, daily rituals, and lifestyle moments and achieve stronger engagement.