• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, March 19, 2026

Highly ranked tennis pro Jessica Pegula can’t control the air at her outdoor tennis matches, but she’s been using Unilever’s Blueair air purifiers in her indoor spaces for the past five years. For the past month, she’s also been starring in an ad campaignfor the brand.

The NBA’s New York Knicks, meanwhile, last week announced Blueair as its “official air care partner.”

For the 30-year-old brand, its first use of sports is part of a dramatic shift in marketing strategy.

While Blueair has long espoused the healthy aspects of clean air (see its 2024 “Air Designed for a Better Life” campaign), the brand has now been repositioned “for people anywhere they are: their homes, their studios, their offices,” CMO Lara Kerbaj tells Pharma & Health Insider.

The result is one of the brand’s largest campaign’s ever, allowing it “to enter a new world of creative where we are linking our products to everyday life usage,” Kerbaj says. “It’s no longer a device you use through COVID or flu time, it’s more of something that lives and breathes with you. And every person needs to improve their sleep.”

Pegula certainly does in the campaign’s hero :60 spot: “To win, you need optimal conditions,” the tennis star says, “and the big three: sleep, sleep and sleep.”

“Jess actually created the insight of this campaign,” notes Kerbaj. “She said, ‘When I’m on the court, it’s very difficult for me to control the weather or how my opponent plays, or how the crowd is going to react, or how the floor is going to be. The only thing I can control is how I sleep the night before I get ready for the match.’ For us, this was genius.”

When Blueair decided it wanted to start using celebrities and enter the lifestyle world for the first time,  “We got very close to signing a couple, including Lindsay Lohan and John Legend. But something told me, we needed to really find an angle,” Kerbaj says.

Any celeb representative needed to have “authenticity.” After looking into various areas that Blueair could “optimize” for, sports popped out. “It’s not very tapped in our category, and it really links into what we stand for as a brand. It’s all about performance.”

Next, the brand needed to choose what sport its celebrity should come from. They chose tennis “because you can partner with one person,” Kerbaj explains. “We explored Taylor Fritz, Madison Keys. Then we came across Jess. We spoke to her team.”

And, perhaps most importantly, “We found out she actually uses the product.”

“It’s a very authentic story,” Kerbaj continues, and even includes two dogs (“Pets are a very big thing for us”). So Blueair shot the campaign at Pegula’s house in Florida, complete with the dogs, and if you believe the commercial, with Pegula herself self-directing.

What’s for sure is that Artisan Council is the creative agency, with Tinuiiti handling media buying.

The campaign includes a :30 cutdown of the hero video on connected TV like Hulu and HBO Max, plus :15 and :06 versions, social media posts, podcasts and targeted tennis print publications like Racket, the latter of which is working with Blueair on events at tennis tournaments

With Pegula as an individual athlete kicking off Blueair’s tie-ins, Kerbaj says it was time to move on to step two in the brand’s sports strategy: a team.

That team, the Knicks, has kicked off its tie-ins with Blueair just as the NBA regular season winds down, leading to what the team hopes will be a long run in the playoffs. 

The partnership includes the integration of Blue Air purification into the Knicks training center in Tarrytown, New York, along with a bevy of activities at the team’s more famous home: Madison Square Garden.

After the individual and the team partnerships, Kerbaj says to expect step three of Blueair’s new approach: “more driven in purpose, where we want to partner with a younger team in soccer or something that’s up and coming, where we basically support the growth of generations.  So the strategy (was) honed on authenticity through our first partner, more culture and pop in the second partner, and then more purpose in the third partner.” 

Overall, she concludes, “Our target has definitely expanded from not only people who are looking for air purifiers to help with the flu or with viruses, now to people who want to really optimize their space and their sleep so that they can perform better.”

Blueair’s competitors in the air purifier space include Levoit, Shark and Coway.