I Spy With My BrandsEye: World Cup Sponsorship

There are only two days to go until the start of the FIFA World Cup and South Africa is abuzz with Football Fever. From endless coverage of football-related stories, to cars covered in South African flags - soccer is definitely the order of the day.

The FIFA World Cup sees 32 Countries battle it out for the top award in international football. With the tournament bring broadcast to 213 countries, it is little wonder that sponsors are paying top dollar to be associated with this prestigious tournament. From the BrandsEye perspective, we thought it might be interesting to see whether the brands associated with the World Cup are really getting their money’s worth.

It turns out that sponsoring this event doesn’t guarantee online conversation:

• Sponsorship of the World Cup has been fruitful for McDonalds over the past two days, generating 142 mentions of the brand. This resulted in 853 250 people being reached and earning McDonalds R193 046 in free advertising.
• In the case of Mahindra Satyam’s sponsorship however, money spent seems to have vanished down the proverbial drain - their relationship with the tournament hasn’t been mentioned once online in the last two days.

Despite fewer mentions for some, all 6 World Cup partners can consider the sponsorship an astute move. All have seen high volumes of conversation around their brand online, even if they are not mentioned in association with the tournament. Visa is benefitting the most: their sponsorship achieved R300 988 worth of advertising from 122 mentions reaching 1 333 660 people.

The Football World Cup is often regarded as the most global of all sporting events and our research into the event supports this:

Conversation around the sponsors was divided geographically with the UK taking the lion’s share.

• UK - 10%
• SA - 6%
• Netherlands - 1%
• Japan - 1%
• Germany - 3%
• France - 1%
• Canada - 2%
• Brazil - 1%
• Australia - 1%

The dominant languages in the conversation were

• 88% English
• Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese all receiving 2%.
• Closely followed by Polish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Dutch all receiving 1%.

Overall in the last 48 hours 6 836 040 people were exposed to a conversation about the relationship between one of the World Cup sponsors and the tournament. This was achieved through 1 952 conversations in 48 hours.

Brands are promoting their relationship with the World Cup, as can be expected, but this only accounts for 15% of the conversation in total. The bulk is from consumers, with 76% of all mentions. Press accounts for the final 9% of the conversation.

Twitter only occupies 9% of the conversation (which is comparatively very low). It's also interesting to see that 8% of the conversation is coming through individuals introducing brands through comments in blog posts - i.e. the blog post was on another topic, but in the blog comments the brand was brought up.

On analysing what affect sponsorship of this World Cup has had on its partnering brands, it seems to have been made clear that, unless you are FIFA itself, a return is not guaranteed.