The 2010 FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa in June. Advertisements for ESPN's coverage began running as early as 2008 in conjunction with UEFA's confederation championship tournament. More recently, advertising and hyping for the event have reached enormous levels in the United States, with ESPN's advertisements running many times daily on their family of networks.
ESPN's partnership with the band U2, perhaps the group with the biggest global presence today, has given us another example of the attention to detail that advertisers are giving to an individual event's already-existing brand. The 2010 World Cup is being billed as Africa's "coming out party," the continent having never before hosted the world's largest event. The atmosphere that has surrounded SA2010 has been very elegantly conceived, with organizers paying special attention to Africa's long tribal history and very rich cultural base. With respect to South Africa in particular, the "coming out party" theme has been used to the fullest extent. Ads have centered around Africa's departure from apartheid and the power that the World Cup has to united nations. In fact, the latest ad that ESPN rolled out featured U2's Bono doing a voiced-over manifesto for the World Cup over the lead-in pickups to one of the band's newer tracks (Magnificent, from the "No Line on the Horizon" album). The ad is embedded below.
Other major brands have also undertaken major efforts in order to harness the World Cup's power. To an advertiser, the World Cup represents two things; a captivated audience number in the billions and an opportunity for cause-based advertising. The correlation between the two is rather obvious, so let's address just how an advertiser can harness both of these characteristics to derive excellent return on advertising investment. We can begin by looking at Pepsi, a company that has had a long-running interest in soccer (or football, depending on your nationality). Pepsi's ads have been well received in the soccer community, especially their World Cup-centric efforts. Recently, they began running ads featuring some of the top players from around the globe (Thierry Henry, Lionel Messi, Didier Drogba, Andrei Arshavin, etc.).
They were very astute in the particular pieces that they emphasized in the video. Using Didier Drogba, a native of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and the music of Akon, himself Senegalese, shows a very intelligent yet subtle theme; harnessing the power of the family and kinship hallmarks of African culture. By showing these heroic figures in Africa soccer and music, the ad speaks to many demographics while still fitting into the umbrella theme that the South African World Cup Committee has created. And the best part? Pepsi isn't even one of the title sponsors of the World Cup. Coca-Cola is.
This also brings up an interesting choice that many major companies face with regards to such major sporting events; do we advertise at the event or during the broadcast? Coca-Cola has for several World Cup cycles had their familiar script-and-bottle logo on their red background seen just to either side of the halfway line. It is so engrained in a soccer fan's mind that it has almost become synonymous with the Cup. Because of this synonymity, Pepsi has had to shell out enormous amounts of money just to even think of competing with the recognition Coke gets. Getting eleven of the world's top players plus Akon together for an advertisement costs a fortune and will only be seen in 30 second intervals. Coke's choice (tactically brilliant from a branding perspective) several World Cups ago equates to their brand and their logo being seen every time the ball crosses midfield. A conservative estimate for the amount of time that logo is in front of the billion or so TV viewers puts the figure at 40 minutes.
Per game.
Every game.
The World Cup format has a total of 64 games. Doing the simple math, that means that Coke gets over 42 hours of face-time without having to spend the money that Pepsi does to create the ad. And Coke doesn't really even have to try anymore to fit into a particular World Cup's brand -- it is already seen as a staple in every World Cup.
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