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The Biggest Stage Of Them All

The power of sport as a vehicle to move people toward meaningful brand relationships is no secret. Experience is a big deal. With loads and loads of endless bits of content spread across a slew of media channels, experience matters now more than ever. The increasingly digitalized human experience and the impact that social technologies currently have in society and daily lifestyle have never been as potent and ripe for exploration. Insert the number one event in all of sports, the World Cup, with a viewing reach of half the world’s population. That scale, combined with the passion of individual national pride of fans is a beautiful proposition for the usual list of top-shelf brands with the capability of creating unifying global messages centered around the facilitation of learning, creating and sharing. The competition among them is as fierce as ever to remain linked to the World Cup platform and to the emotional and cultural sense of what that embodies -both from a consumer and brand point of view.

In its most primal form, the World Cup is a social viewing and participatory experience shared among both loyalists and passer-by’s alike. These experiences are derived from a national rallying-cry, whether conscious or unconscious, develops into an extension of ourselves. National pride is part of our shared narrative – and savvy marketers have shelled out big bucks in an attempt to tap into that. The World Cup brings a sense of community, something that unifies countries for one month every four years. Of course, it also brings the likes of ambush marketing, complaints of the official ball, opportunities for corporate and social responsibility, health organizations raising hell over World Cup fast food sponsorship and the missed chance to increase awareness about healthy eating.

Speaking of ambush marketing, according to FIFA, the 2006 World Cup, held in Germany, featured 3,300 “rights violations” in 84 countries, a major concern given the eight-figure amounts that FIFA’s six top-level partners and seven World Cup sponsors pay to officially align with the world’s biggest sporting event. As for 2010, Nike and Pepsi have recently demonstrated, the open distribution and virality of the web create a whole new path for the infringement on “official partners”.

Brands are doing it differently. Some campaigns have a super-focused (Coke “Open Happiness” – creating a campaign centered around the idea of “Celebration“, Nike “Next Level“) approach while others activities are housed under a big, overarching idea (Visa “Go Fans“, Anheuser-Busch InBev “Budweiser United” – with a “Bud House” reality show) and others are taking a more fragmented method (Adidas “Every Team Needs” – heavily investing in new ball, footwear and apparel launches tied to the tournament, McDonald’s “Taste the Glory” is deploying its activities at the games differently in each market.) As brands continue to up the ante for on and off the field sponsorship global soccer market-share, look for the real winners to be the ones who can successfully gain access to raw consumer emotion by linking brand messages to an increase in performance/quality of life in ways that are fun, shareable and full of substance.

For the first time in World Cup history marketers are using new social technologies to connect soccer fans while building goodwill for their brands. The boundary between offline and online experiences is becoming ever-increasingly thin. And that’s an awesome thing. Our digital personas, through all of our online posting, liking and sharing of substance are influencing our offline behavior and personal narratives. Google and FIFA teamed together to deliver useful and relevant World Cup content. Microsoft is promoting Bing with a Foursquare program that awards a virtual badge to users who check in at soccer bars in select U.S. cities. It recently broadened the program with a key Bing feature, a map application for users to find bars to watch games by teaming up with local event information provider, Thrillist.

We are living in a real-time society and participating in the global bubble that is the World Cup. These new social ideas are being intensified and facilitated in such a way that makes this the first global event that utilizes the power of the social web social that wasn’t possible until now. And that’s not to mention all of the available outlets for how we can consume and access World Cup content. Watching highlights the next day on TV or YouTube suddenly seems a downright ancient way to keep up with the action. The difference from 2006 to 2010 is a vastly different landscape with unprecedented ease of access to live feeds, news and information. This year the play book is being written and is the blueprint for what’s coming. ESPN and ABC will stream 54 games live on the newly launched ESPN3.com, formerly ESPN360 and will be available live on mobile devices to customers whose plans include TV on their phones.

While we revel in all the exciting implementations of digital media and interconnectivity, agencies and brands must never overlook the importance of a core group of evangelists to help spread the word for them, or they will never connect the broad audiences to the local, niche ones. Reach out to your influential targets early, let them know the gist of what’s coming and get them excited around an idea – after all, this is the biggest stage of them all!

And for all those tuning in to the World Cup, check out this nifty interactive World Cup schedule by Marca

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