Dubai
The Fifa World Cup is the biggest single sporting event in the world. It offers an unrivalled opportunity to reach out not only to football fans, but to TV viewers in general.
It is estimated that up to 200 million people in the region will tune in to the competition on TV alone. With such a large-scale event, media owners’ costs for acquiring the rights to use content go up dramatically. This cost is passed on to advertisers who are keen to capture such an important viewing opportunity — in particular those organisations who see demand for their products and services increase during a World Cup.
The increases are across the board; TV, online, radio and print, and dependent on the type of content being produced and shared (bearing in mind that official licensing rights are with BeIN sports). Other media owners have specific rights for content that they use in creative and engaging ways. The highest financial investment is obviously in TV.
Global brands are at an advantage as they leverage global rights to use the event in the most engaging way by producing World Cup-specific material. Many advertisers from the region are creatively using their assets and even acquiring rights to feature players in their ads for the MENA region — for example KFC and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The cost of advertising during the event is prohibitive to a lot of organisations who would rather wait until the competition is over. However, for those advertisers whose sales are impacted positively by the World Cup, finding creative ways around the high charges for TV broadcasts that will still reach a large audience is the name of the game, with digital being the most desirable platform.
Many digital media owners are offering interesting opportunities to engage with the fans of the game, be it through video or display. It will cover everything from official World Cup content to reproduced programming, as well as content developed around the event.
The World Cup is about more than a football competition. It’s about the atmosphere, analysis, opinions and the different nations participating. With the competition this year taking place in Brazil, an exotic country with a rich heritage of footballing success, there are many opportunities.
A number of interesting platforms are being developed from the likes of Yahoo, Koora, Facebook and YouTube. With the rise of video in the region, video-related content will make a huge difference this year.
More interestingly, for advertisers, social media is where fans will engage with each other and with brands in conversations that I believe will be unprecedented in the region. Simple and shareable content will be extremely important to fuel online conversations.
— The writer is regional managing director at Initiative GCC.
