4 Marketing Lessons from the 2010 World Cup

By Natalie Farinacci | Posted Jul 28, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) | Filed in: Brand Marketing, Social Media

While numerous organizations embraced the opportunity to expose their brands during the most-watched sporting event in the world, some of those marketers chose to position their brand more strategically than others by engaging with their audiences through integrated marketing campaigns across multiple channels.

Particularly, compared to the previous 2006 event, marketers had many more opportunities to reach audiences online. During the last World Cup, Facebook still only allowed access to college and high school students and Twitter was just launching in July of that year.

Even before the event began, Hubspot and the head of new media for FIFA predicted that this year’s World Cup would be the biggest event in social media yet, and that many would watch and/or catch scores by monitoring social networks.

Here are some lessons we can learn from successes (and missed opportunities) from the World Cup on how to execute integrated marketing tactics to reach and engage your audience.

Lesson #1: Be your own publisher.

Several brands utilized YouTube as a way to expand reach. For example, Anheuser-Busch InBev created a digital reality show, “Bud House”, which featured 32 fans representing the 32 World Cup nations living together for a month, similar to a “Big Brother” setup. As a result, Budweiser was one of the top branded video channels on YouTube during the tournament, and surpassed its goal of 5 million views.

Similarly, Nike launched a video on YouTube, Write the Future, instead of paying for a World Cup commercial (a first for the brand). The video received more than 15 million views on YouTube alone, according to a post on B2B Voices, What B2B communicators can learn from the 2010 World Cup.  

Lesson #2: Capitalize on big news/ events to gain momentum for company announcements.

Twitter got in front of a huge, targeted audience by announcing its new location-based service, Twitter Places, during the opening games of the World Cup. Twitter was able to test the product easily by having one central location, the South Africa stadium, where they could target a large amount of people willing and interested in both watching the games and tweeting about them. Timing was key for Twitter, as they made the announcement of the function, available in 65 countries, when the World Cup was already one of Twitter’s top-trending topics.

Lesson #3: Empower your brand evangelists.

Many of the soccer players discussed the tournament and supported their country on Twitter in between games. While tweeting or posting on social networks is banned in some professional sports, this conversation helped spread news about the tournament, players’ countries and other news in South Africa.

The players also got a sense of the passion and pride from their fans, no matter where their fans were located. This “backchannel” made for a deeper, more engaging experience and increased awareness exponentially.

Lesson #4: Combine off- and online marketing and PR efforts into a cohesive strategy.

One organization that failed to capitalize on the World Cup was the country of South Africa. Even though South Africa hosted an event that attracted an average international TV audience of around 400 million viewers per match and more than 700 million viewers for the World Cup final, the country missed a major opportunity to increase its online presence and build relationships with new, relevant audiences.

As NetGrowth Group’s Alec Campbell explains, although Google’s Keyword Tool reported an average of 3 million global searches conducted per month (this year) for “World Cup 2010”, none of the South African websites ranked in Google results. Had South Africa prepared its online presence (i.e. optimizing the government’s website, publishing content about the event and establishing feeds on its site) before hosting the World Cup, the country’s website could have received more traffic, thus reaching new audiences about tourism and country news.

Considering the advances in marketing available today in the context of a quadrennial event like the World Cup, we see just how much the industry has changed, what new tools are available, and how they can be leveraged for success. It will be interesting to discover what changes and innovations in technology and social media will inspire marketers for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and other global sporting events, such as the Olympic games.

What World Cup marketing campaigns impressed you?

Natalie Farinacci is an associate consultant at PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency and PR firm. Follow Natalie on Twitter @natalie_f.

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Photo credit: Times Live