Point Oh!

While I may like baseball (or hockey, basketball, tennis, football and most winter olympic games) better than soccer, I can never help but get dragged into the excitement around the World Cup.  It may have been a little easier when I lived in New York where it was easier to see a Brazilian match in a bar full of Brazilians but, even though my World Cup viewing parties now consist of only a few friends in my basement with bagels and mimosas, I still find myself again drawn to the game.  Maybe it’s the global hype or the melding of politics and sport, I’m not sure.  What I do know is that I will be spending countless hours consuming all things World Cup in the next few weeks and have my share of afternoon hangovers to prove it.

Outside of the game itself, the World Cup is also the largest sports marketing of any year, dwarfing even the Olympics.  How big is the World Cup?  The World Cup finals averages over 700 million viewers compared to just over 100 million for the Super Bowl.  In fact, you could combine the viewing audiences of the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, Summer Olympics, World Series, NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals and you’d still come out with a smaller audience than the World Cup.

So if the World Cup is so big then where is the competition for funniest World Cup commercial or consumer generated campaign to create the ultimate World Cup Doritos spot?  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

For starters, there’s no centralized way to reach people.  There are dozens of sites that cover the tournament, with Fifa.com garnering only a fraction of the traffic ESPN.com gets in an average month.  Similarly, broadcast and print sources are all over the map.  S

o how do you become THE brand of the World Cup?

One trick is to pick channels that reach global audiences with a message that is universal enough to appeal to anyone who is interested in the event.  Global localization is generally one of the easiest ways to throw your money away.  I can’t even tell you how many clients I’ve seen blow through huge budgets on multi-language localization only to see traffic to secondary market sites dwindle away to next to nothing.

So who can actually pull this off?  Let’s look at two competitors: Nike and adidas.

The Nike Write the Future spot (developed by Weiden + Kennedy) might be one of my favorite marketing videos of all time.  Not only is it a masterpiece of video editing and creativity using Nike’s top athletes (including some non-soccer players) but it also does everything that most other World Cup marketers have failed to do.  First and foremost, it’s about the sport so language is almost irrelevant in it’s success.  Secondly, it’s globally referential without alienating any region.  It’s also been distributed on multiple global video sites, garnering more than 15 million views on YouTube alone so it eliminates the barrier of most World Cup media.  The video captures the essence of the World Cup better than FIFA can in it’s own marketing materials and thereby weaves the Nike brand right into the event in a way that makes it seem completely organic (even though Nike is comparatively new to the game).

Adidas, who has been involved with soccer for significantly longer than Nike, attempted a similar effort with their Cantina 2010 spot.  Launching a short while after the record setting Nike spot, adidas had a lot of catching up to do to gain SOV.  Unlike Nike, who is singularly focused on athletes, adidas is more comfortable being a hybrid sports/fashion brand and they choose their talent accordingly.  While the spot did feature soccer stars like David Beckham, it also featured artists and pop culture figures like Snoop Dog and French house music band Daft Punk.  Most importantly, the spot was set in a scene from Stars Wars.  Put all together and it’s a pretty entertaining clip but the connection to the World Cup is weak.  Additionally, the range of talent almost works against the initiative, leaving a degree of uncertainty as to what the main point of the video is.  It comes off as one of those ideas where “going viral” was the strategy and the creative concept.

Looking at a different industry with a less direct connection to the game, Budweiser also got into the mix with their Bud United campaign.  The campaign is a Real World style reality show served on YouTube that takes 30 fans from different countries and puts them in a house in South Africa together.  There are a lot of ingredients to success at play here.  By featuring fans from different countries, Bud widens the appeal beyond the United States and the connection to the World Cup is obvious and strong.  Using YouTube as the platform and destination has it’s strengths and weaknesses since the platform is technically global but it’s an external engagement for Bud, which prevents prospective consumers from exploring the brand on a deeper level.  All the footage is also in English, which gives the creative a somewhat less genuine effect, although sub-titles would be a tough sell with Bud’s primary consumer.

What each of these campaigns demonstrates is how much of a challenge global event marketing can be online.  While it’s easy to say that Nike is coming out ahead, they also have the fewest challenges in this kind of environment due to the positioning of their brand.  Measuring true success for campaigns like these has to be limited to region-by-region as the objectives vary so widely from market to market.  Can the same creative market your brand to emerging markets with limited brand recognition and your primary markets where you are a household name?  If you’re only targeting your primary market in the US, is it smart to dedicate so many resources to a sport that still has only a relatively fringe fan base domestically?

And you thought beating Brazil was the toughest challenge of the World Cup?