How successful were FIFA and its sponsors at protecting their brands during the World Cup?
This article reflects on how successful FIFA and its sponsors were at protecting their brands during this year’s FIFA World Cup. It also looks at the extent to which non-sponsors were able to mobilise the online population behind their clever campaigns.
BACKGROUND
In what was dubbed the first proper social media World Cup by The International News Media Association (INMA)1, observers were keen to see how successful FIFA’s ever-vigilant rights protection strategy would be in relation to its most valuable assets, its intellectual property, especially in light of the explosion in social media coverage. It is worth noting that FIFA’s IP Manual solemnly declared that “FIFA’s official logos, symbols and other graphic trade marks may not be used on any social media platform”2.
FIFA had already made its intentions clear prior to the start of the tournament by filing numerous trade mark registrations and getting the Brazilian government to include stringent measures against ambush marketing in the Lei Geral da Copa (the “World Cup Law”). Given that research from June 2014 indicated that nearly 40% of UK, US and Brazilian consumers wrongly believed that Nike, MasterCard and Pepsi were official World Cup sponsors3, FIFA’s concerns could perhaps be seen as somewhat understandable.
At the same time the influence of smartphones and social media is stronger than ever. Even before the tournament started, the World Cup had already been mentioned approximately 10 million times on Twitter this year. The Nike commercial for this year’s event has been viewed a staggering 86 million times on YouTube4. In comparison, the commercial for the 2010 World Cup has 4.6 million views5. As football fans share ads, videos and thoughts online, these digital channels have the power to reach more people quicker than ever and make anything go viral. As an example, with 35.6 million tweets, the semi-final between Brazil and Germany is the most-discussed single sports game ever on Twitter6. Facebook also claimed that the event created an unprecedented level of activity on the platform with a total of 3.6 billion interactions7.
This growth in digital and social media has given non-sponsors a chance to capitalise on the World Cup; as of 6 June, only 6 of the 11 most shared football ads online were from officialsponsors8.