By Daniel Avshalom, VP Media, Zoomd
Following the high ratings achieved during the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, many marketers are undoubtedly asking their media agencies to purchase advertising during the FIFA World Cup being played in the US, Canada, and Mexico between June 11th and July 19th.
With advertising on FOX and Telemundo/NBCU (in Spanish) basically sold out, it will take some creativity to tie advertising to the FIFA tournament, but there are lots of opportunities for marketers to tap into the excitement of the FIFA World Cup. There are additional TV advertising channels through Fox, including advertising on Fox-owned Tubi, which will broadcast select games, as well as partnering with Fox Sports Content Studio to take advantage of partner opportunities with the network during the tournament.
For marketers with TV ad campaigns, the FIFA tournament games will also be broadcast on Fubo, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Sling Blue, and DirecTV. Packages include in-game coverage on DirecTV as well as pre- and post-game shoulder coverage on Univision, DirecTV, LG, Fox/Tubi via TripleLift, running at $30-40 Cost Per Thousand (CPMs). This is about half of what it would cost to advertise on Fox during the actual games, still delivering a strong reach.
With network TV a challenge, CTV provides marketers with opportunities to benefit from the impact of big-screen creative. Given the excitement around the World Cup, there will be a lot of soccer-focused content broadcast on CTV channels, including game recaps and analysis. Furthermore, data from MNTN shows that NFL ads on CTV were 66% more effective than those running on linear TV.
There’s an app for that
Even if ad time is sold out on Fox and Telemundo during the games, the Fox Sports App will carry every game and will offer additional FIFA-related content, providing marketers with rich and varied in-app advertising opportunities.
Speaking of apps, Lay’s is creating a WhatsApp Channels chat to broadcast photos, voice notes, and messages from celebrities and noted soccer players, including Lionel Messi, Alexia Putellas, and Steve Carell. By inviting users to sign up for a WhatsApp Channel, Lay’s gains first-party data, including users’ phone numbers, and insights based on the WhatsApp engagement metrics.
Non-sponsoring marketers can win big in the FIFA World Cup
Though Lay’s is a tournament sponsor, there are examples of non-sponsoring marketers outperforming category sponsors. For the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Nike broadcast a 3-minute video entitled ‘Write the Future’. Though Nike wasn’t an official tournament sponsor, the company generated significantly more online buzz, according to data from Nielsen, than tournament sponsors Adidas and Coke.
Even if you don’t have a marketing department like Nike’s, there are still opportunities to generate buzz and sales impact around the FIFA World Cup without being a sponsor. Marketers can sponsor individual players in the tournament and include the players in their marketing, though they must be sure to not violate FIFA policies or any sponsors already working with that player’s national team.
Advertise early in the tournament
If there is one lesson I’ve learned running multiple ad campaigns in FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships is that it’s important to advertise early. The first reason is because fan engagement drops dramatically after the national team is eliminated. So, for marketers targeting fans of Team USA, if the team doesn’t make it past the group stage, expect significantly lower ratings for the remainder of the tournament. Sure, diehard soccer fans will watch, but it won’t have the kind of ratings that a USA vs. Germany or Argentina semi-final will have.
The second reason for advertising early is because the costs increase significantly as the tournament advances, making it harder to achieve cost-driven KPIs. That said, Team USA has advanced past the group stage six times, including in 1994, when the tournament was held in the US, so the odds that Team USA advances are good, but the costs for those games will be very high. That’s why I’d recommend allocating the majority of FIFA ad spend to the pre-tournament and group stages, when fan engagement is highest and costs are lowest, setting aside a smaller portion of the budget for the elimination rounds.
Retarget and measure
Because there are limited in-tournament opportunities to target users, retargeting is an effective tactic to re-engage with relevant prospects. Utilizing DSP household-level targeting to retarget homes that consumed match content with branded messaging on other CTV platforms can help close the sale with relevant users at a cost-effective price point.
To ensure achieving campaign KPIs, it’s important to establish cross-campaign measurement, particularly for CTV campaigns where attribution is probabilistic via household IP matching for view-throughs. Both AppsFlyer and Adjust offer CTV attribution integrations, but they need to be configured before the campaign starts.
If your boss/clients are applying pressure to present a marketing plan for the FIFA World Cup, there are still opportunities available. It will mean going broad and being creative, but we’re in a creative industry. And many of these tactics will enable achieving better KPIs than many of the sponsoring marketers on Fox will reach.
