Twitter Your Team to Victory, World Cup is in Fans' Hands
Wednesday, 13 January 2010 | The Business of Sport
Football sponsors will spend billions on multimedia to give supporters direct involvement
By Jonathan Clegg, The Wall Street Journal Europe
This summer's World Cup in South Africa isn't just the biggest event on the sporting calendar, it's also the biggest marketing opportunity of the year.
Eight out of 10 people around the world are expected to watch the four-week competition and broadcast rights alone are estimated at $2.7 billion.
Billions more will be spent by the global brands that have signed up as official sponsors and are banking on the tournament to give revenues a welcome boost.
While a cumulative global television audience of 40 billion will guarantee a series of money-spinning advertising deals when the tournament kicks off in June, digital and mobile are also ready to play an unprecedented role in the fan experience in South Africa.
Increasingly, the corporate partners of Fifa, football's world governing body, are turning away from traditional TV and billboard campaigns and using social networking sites to make their pitch to fans of the beautiful game.
Sony Ericsson -- whose parent company Sony Corp. has spent $305 million to become one of Fifa's six long-term corporate partners alongside Adidas, Coca-Cola, Emirates, Hyundai and Visa -- will use its sponsorship of the competition to create a digital community of sports fans to get its message across.
The mobile-phone handset maker plans to use social-media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to engage directly with individual fans rather than broadcasting to millions. Calum MacDougall, director of global marketing partnerships at Sony Ericsson, says 2010 will be the first "social networking World Cup."
"The Fifa 2010 World Cup is Sony Ericsson's first engagement with football, so we looked at where we fit in as a brand and we've made the decision to avoid traditional branding routes," he says.
"Social networking is going to be at the heart of the 2010 World Cup -- you only need to look at the huge rise of people using Web sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to appreciate that.
"We want to focus on being fan-centric, delivering value to fans and engaging them on social media. Putting a logo beside a pitch doesn't necessarily support that, so we're not doing it."
The centerpiece of the campaign will be the launch of an online football application that provides fans with access to videos from World Cup qualifiers and friendly games in the lead-up to the tournament, while Sony Ericsson has also launched the Twitter World Cup, an online competition that encourages fans from participating nations to tweet their teams to victory in a virtual tournament.
In addition, they will be able to share all their favorite moments directly with their friends using social-networking site applications built into the Sony Ericsson handsets, including WorldCupedia, described as the world's first football-focused search engine.
"Social media is increasingly important for all brands," Mr. MacDougall says. "It's certainly key for us and it's a great platform to support our strategy to engage fans.
"People are already on Facebook and Twitter talking about football. If we can enhance that, people will have a better perception of our brand."
Sponsorship experts agree that the tournament in South Africa will see a significant shift to consumer-focused, viral campaigns as more and more brands employ social networking sites as the basis for their marketing efforts.
"If you re a mass-market brand and want to talk to a lot of consumers, you've got to use social media now because that's where the consumers are," says Tim Crow, chief executive of U.K.-based sports sponsorship consultants Synergy.
"There's also a change in the style of what brands are doing," he adds. "It used to be about broadcasting messages, now it's about getting involved in conversations and letting people play with your campaign.
"It's not just a feature of the World Cup, it's a feature of just about anything that major sponsors and major brands are doing now. It just so happens that it's the first time we'll see it as a major feature of a World Cup."
Despite falling advertising rates, campaigns that revolve around social media are also attractive because they are cheaper than cross-media ads, which for a huge event such as the World Cup, can cost companies millions of dollars.
At a time when marketers are under pressure to prove campaign results, Mr. Crow says that, increasingly, big brands can be expected to start moving away from a costly mass-media approach to something much more focused and efficient.
"Talking to a lot of consumers is much cheaper than it used to be in the old days when you'd do a TV ad, you'd do a print ad and you'd do a poster," he says.
"It doesn't cost anything to set up a Twitter feed. If you're the sponsor of a particular sports person and you do something around their Twitter page, you know you're being 100% efficient because all of the people following them are bound to be fans of that particular person, so there's a high degree of efficiency."
However, analysts have warned that a campaign based on social media could expose major sponsors to the risk of ambush marketing as rival brands seek to fool consumers into thinking they are official sponsors of the tournament.
"Ambush marketing is becoming much more of an issue generally -- not just around the World Cup -- and it's incredibly difficult to control," says Simon Chadwick, a professor of sports-business strategy and marketing at Coventry University in the U.K.
"The growth of social media is just compounding this because it's fragmenting the landscape. It's making identity more difficult to determine, it's making the instigators of ambush marketing campaigns more difficult to track and legislatively it would be very difficult to do anything about this."
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This article was published in The Wall Street Journal Europe, issue 13-1-2010.
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