FIFA World Cup - Brand Battle Ground

Contributed By AMAN OBEROI

Football is no child’s play, its serious business.  The global football market is valued at $10.9 billion, with the U.S. siphoning off $900 million. Top dog, however, is the U.K., with $1.4 billion being spent on soccer. In 2006, Brits spent almost $245 million on replica football merchandise.

Last year the biggest football fiesta took place in South Africa – the 19^th FIFA World Cup. It is the most widely viewed spectacle across the globe with an estimated viewership of around 700 million for the finals alone.

This is a golden opportunity for anyone who can shell out the money to garner the maximum eyeballs they can. When it comes to sports apparel, this event is what all their efforts boil down. With billions of dollars riding on their world cup campaigns no one can afford to make a mistake.

Nike and Adidas are the leading players in the Sports Apparel Industry. They have a strong presence throughout the world and together they account for about two-thirds of this market, with Puma coming in a distant third.

Adidas has long been associated with the World Cup and has been the official Ball manufacturer for FIFA since 1970 and it was also the official sponsor of the World Cup. Apart from this , 12 teams kits were sponsored by Adidas as compared to Nike’s  nine.

But as the world cup kicked off both the companies had only one thing on their mind, whose brand generates the maximum buzz.

Nike countered Adidas’s official sponsor strategy by launching a massive campaign “ Write the Future” which went viral on the internet, it also bought the top banner ad on Youtube (which readapted its logo for the football frenzy). Nike also leveraged the success of its 2010 World Cup Write the Future ambush marketing effort with a campaign extension that promotes HIV/AIDS awareness in partnership with (RED). The pro-social message, which stars soccer icon Didier Drogba, is particularly apt in Africa as "ground zero" for the global AIDS crisis.

It  also let fans "Write Your Headline, Write the Future" in an interactive extension of its World Cup campaign. Johannesburg's 30-story Life Center is served as a digital billboard that projected a mix of soccer stars with social networkers' personal messages sent via #NikeFuture on Twitter, Facebook, QQ in China and Mxit in South Africa.

The Write the Future ad was a 3 minute video featuring the top footballers with whom Nike has a contract, even though these footballers such were wearing Adidas kits during the World cup (example Cristiano Ronaldo who plays for Portugal , sponsored by Adidas). The video was aired on primetime sports channels before and after the world cup matches and garnered about 20 million views till date . Adidas tried to make a comeback with a video based on star wars featuring Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg and David Beckham but couldn't match upto the buzz created by Nike.

But even as Nike took the lead in this respect Adidas had crossed $2 billion in sales before the World Cup had begun.

This pattern was seen throughout the World Cup before the matches started. Non-sponsors outperformed sponsors in terms of online marketing around the event. There's Nike over Adidas; Pepsi over Coke; Carlsberg over Budweiser. FIFA organizers got a lot of cooperation from South African officials to stop ambush marketing during the matches. 36 Dutch fans in orange mini dresses were removed from a game, for planning a stunt for non-sponsor Bavaria Beer.

But as the world cup progressed the buzz around Nike died down and Adidas took the lead again , partly due to the controversy over the Official Jabulani ball and partly due to the success of the teams that it sponsored mainly Spain and Germany which were tipped as the favourites for the Cup.

But FIFA, which earns 30% of its income from sponsorships, can't do much about marketers capitalizing on World Cup excitement on the web (or TV, for that matter). This raises the question of what the future holds for big-money sponsorships around events. Non-sponsors are showing they can do as well or better without paying up for "official" status, especially if they have existing marketing relationships with the athletes themselves, as Nike and Pepsi do .This becomes all the more important in the Indian context, as we are on the threshold of witnessing another sporting phenomenon, The 2011 cricket World Cup. In the past, companies have not shied away from launching an offense on the official sponsors (ala Pepsi versus Coke, Nothing official about it campaign in 1996). So it still is a tough call whether to go Official or not , but with stricter laws and stronger enforcement in order to protect official sponsors by the governing bodies such as FIFA and ICC, the ambush marketing campaigns are set to get better and more innovative than ever before.