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Football Federation Australia isn’t alone wrestling with the media-rights dilemma – the Football Association is confronting the same devilish call with regard to the British equivalent of our anti-siphoning list.
Can the FA afford England’s international fixtures continuing to appear on free-to-air? Can it afford them not to be there?
Like the FA, FFA will have more money in its pocket by giving cable operators exclusivity over its flagship. When was the last time football chose accessibility ahead of a bucket of money?
That won’t impress those who see the game’s salvation here as free-to-air exposure. Where confinement to pay-TV leaves the game in the broader public’s mind and other media outlets attitude to it is the big question. Will football find itself out of pocket later on for taking the short view now?
A clue to where we’re heading and why can be found in the wash-up to last year’s World Cup and the indications there that the sponsor-driven free-to-air financial model that’s prevailed the last thirty or so years really has hit the wall.
Marketing-wise the outcomes from South Africa 2010 were markedly different from the eight preceding World Cups in which FIFA’s grew its revenues from sponsorships and media rights from $14 million in 1978 to circa $5 billion last year. On the face of it, Germany 2006 may have been the last of the old paradigm.
According to Dr Nikolaus Eberl, author of BrandOvation: How Germany won the World Cup of Nation Branding, “the biggest winner in 2006 turned out to be McDonald’s with a rise of 24 per cent in event sponsor awareness (85 per cent post-world cup versus 61 per cent pre), followed by Hyundai (50 per cent versus 28 per cent) and Coca-Cola (86 per cent versus 68 per cent).
“In the turnover category, Adidas took the honours by far, scoring a 150 per cent increase in sales of the official tournament ball (15 million sold during the tournament versus six million in 2002), and an astonishing 600 per cent increase in national jerseys purchased (1.5 million versus 250,000 in 2002). Adidas also came out tops in the MIP Brandometer, measuring the success of the seven sports brands represented on the shirts of the 32 competing teams.”
Impressive stuff, but between the South Africa 2010 and the World Cup host nations being decided in December, the comparative data from 2010 came in and the sands had obviously shifted markedly – instead of the 2010 World Cup lifting FIFA’s global partners’ brand recognition, in some cases it diminished over the course of the tournament.
Not even the brand that got the whole sponsor-driven big-sport paradigm underway by ambush marketing the Melbourne Olympics with free shoes could hold its ground. Adidas branded the stadiums to the last blade of grass like it has the last ten World Cups, provided the ball, the winning squad and, to be sure, boots with distinctive orange heels.
A quarter of us still thought Nike was an official FIFA World Cup partner.
The marketers call it “voice”.
Whose voice is being heard? These days with everyone talking at once and messages coming in every which way on all sorts of devices, television isn’t the potent insinuator it was before social media and online activities evolved us off the couch and into keyboard and touch-pad potatoes.
The trends in the numbers but we know the story already because they’re only mapping our changing habits. We know them better than they do. A corporation can pour hundreds of millions of dollars into FIFA’s coffers for the privilege of an official World Cup association but we’ll be as impressed, maybe more by a good viral video.
Thus far the biggest winners from South Africa 2010 have been, as it ought to be, South Africans; apparently the World Cup has done wonders for their tourism industry and vuvuzelas.
The big losers were the multinationals that sank nearly a billion dollars into buying the premium spots on FIFA’s jersey as its “global partners” and walked away with about 0.1 of one per cent the return on investment they’d have picked up from a YouTube ambush.
That’s not just a dud result for FIFA’s bargaining power, it was probably enough to not just tip the scales in Qatar’s favour for 2022 but well and truly awaken pay-television to the possibilities of taking exclusive ownership over football telecasting sooner rather than later. Qatar’s bid appeared not to have the requisite support of the blue-chip multinationals whose marketing objectives have determined World Cup venues these last three decades but it probably didn’t need it because it was unlikely anyone else had it either.
Given the marketing wash-up of South Africa 2010 and the new media’s corrosive impact on the value of the World Cup media rights already, and the rate of change between Germany and South Africa, what might that landscape look like in 2022?
How much would you gamble on getting return on your investment? Once FIFA’s prospective “global partners”, not being charities, saw the writing on the wall if seems doubtful any of Qatar’s competition for 2022 had the blue-chips digging in behind them.
We all know what it is, we’re just arguing over the price and Qatar probably only got it because it got it cheap since it didn’t have to compete with the combined wills of Coke, Sony, Adidas or Great Wall – just some relatively insignificant nation states with some relatively insignificant budgets and the likes of Peter Hargitay racing around on their behalf to talk turkey to ExComm’s deadwood but without any lead in their pencil because the corporations juries were still out. Coke surely had a preference but does a wise business commit money now backing in the value of media rights in 12-years time when they appear to have peaked already?
Maybe it was just a dud World Cup that foreshadowed the dud marketing outcomes? Perhaps, but the Asian Cup was a better tournament and the story is likewise – the jury is out on how much that reflected upon the AFC’s partners and sponsors or what that means might mean for their future investments.
FIFA can control a lot of things but not a Wild West social media’s potential to diminish an event’s value in the eyes of prospective sponsors, and if television exposure is no longer the best way for corporations to sequester football into their brands and they look for a better return on investment and scale back their spending on big-sport – it’s already happening – where to next for not just FIFA’s media-rights revenues but the FA’s and FFA’s now television commercials, branded balls and boots or even ground signage aren’t worth quite what they were before videos went viral and we were all stunned into indifference by the clutter of advertising that’s led to the free-to-air television model being in the strife?
Now formal marketing partnerships are no longer the surefire feather in a corporation’s marketing cap they once were, to who is televised football worth the most?
Pay-TV obviously; subscription viewing with no middleman corporation picking up the tab and defraying those costs by increased sales and production and economies of scale combined with the wonders of tax deduction, or at least not to anywhere near the extent we’ve grown used to. To make up the shortfall we will have to pay on the nose.
To think that we thought we could beat the system by watching for nicks and flicking over while the ads were on. Blame it on the remote control.
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