KEEPING SCORE: Louis Vuitton’s brand campaign featuring Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi is scoring big online.

Because the two soccer stars posted the image showing them playing a game of chess on Saturday, the French luxury house’s campaign has gone viral, racking up a combined 72 million likes on Instagram: 38 million on Ronaldo’s account, 29 million on Messi’s, and greater than five million on the Vuitton account.

Within the wake of the ad, Ronaldo became the primary person to pass 500 million followers on Instagram. Messi is the second most-followed person with 377 million. Although Ronaldo’s post has yet to beat the world record for the most-liked online post, which is held by @world_record_egg’s picture of an egg with 55.9 million likes, it’s already delivering wealthy returns.

Ronaldo’s post had a media impact value of $2.8 million in the primary 48 hours, based on the Launchmetrics scoring system that assigns a monetary value to each post, interaction or article a few brand to measure its performance and impact.

Messi’s post had a price of $2.6 million, and Vuitton’s post was value $1.1 million, based on the info and insights firm, which estimated the entire MIV of the campaign at $13.5 million, based mainly on media reports in regards to the ad.

Under the tag line “Victory Is a State of Mind,” the campaign was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and broke on Saturday, ahead of the opening day of the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. It’s within the lineage of its 2010 Core Values campaign featuring legendary players Pelé, Maradona and Zinedine Zidane playing table football.

The concept was the brainchild of Antoine Arnault, head of communication and image at parent company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, who introduced the influential Core Values campaign, starring iconic personalities comparable to Bono, Mikhail Gorbachev and Angelina Jolie, during his tenure as communications director at Vuitton.

“Bringing these two living legends together, these two modern-day gladiators, had been a longtime dream of mine. I at all times knew that only the Core Values campaign by Louis Vuitton, probably the most iconic maison on this planet, could do them justice,” he said in an announcement on Tuesday.

“The concept of them coming together to play chess got here to me after watching my 15-year-old stepson spend hours watching chess championship games on YouTube,” said Arnault, who’s married to Russian model and philanthropist Natalia Vodianova, referring to his stepson Viktor Portman.

“I assumed that, under Annie Leibovitz’s unique lens, the result might be nothing but legendary. This photo’s beauty goes beyond my wildest expectations but its success on social networks doesn’t surprise me,” he added.

Messi and Ronaldo are shown staring intently at chess pieces placed on the checkerboard canvas of a Louis Vuitton Damier attaché case. Vuitton worked with Bruce Pandolfini, the chess teacher who consulted on the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit,” to find out the positions of the chess pieces in the image.

Eagle-eyed aficionados spotted that it mirrors a famous match between Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura from 2017, which resulted in a draw, suggesting that it’s unimaginable to declare either Ronaldo or Messi the world’s best footballer.

Between 2008 and 2017, the 2 players between them claimed every Ballon d’Or, the award given to the world’s best male footballer, and Messi has won it twice more since then. Heading into the World Cup, the stakes are high for Messi, 35, and Ronaldo, 37, since neither has won the game’s most coveted prize despite their individual achievements.

The World Cup has been dogged with controversy over allegations of corruption at FIFA and questions over host country Qatar’s record on human rights, prompting many brands to maintain a low profile throughout the competition.

Vuitton, which has a history of constructing trophy cases for sports including tennis, basketball, rugby and Formula 1, has had a partnership with FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, since 2010. Along with designing the travel case for the World Cup trophy, it has launched a capsule collection of soccer-themed leather goods.