What Marketers Can Learn From The FIFA World Cup

As one of the largest marketing opportunities in the world, the FIFA World Cup 2014 obviously drew a lot of attention from professionals and fans alike. Marketers had to quickly learn what the fans were looking for and interacting with; helpfully, Marketing Week has listed the top four lessons marketers had to learn in order to stay relevant during the tournament:

1. Paid media still reigns supreme.

As well as investing in paid ads from Google, Facebook and Twitter, marketers also looked into paid content marketing – where targeting is more direct and able to reach more customers, rather than simply posting content and expecting people to see it.

2. Understand globalisation & react to it.

Football as a sport has grown in popularity in markets across the world, meaning the World Cup was an even more global event. Brands and their marketing departments needed to understand and appreciate this, and create a strategy that took globalisation into account.

3. TV is no longer the only viewing screen.

With the popularity of smartphones on the rise – as well as tablets – TV is being slowly pushed back as merely a second screen to watch the games on. The huge influence of social media means fans were constantly flicking between live TV coverage and trending topics. Marketers needed to react to trending topics, as well as invest in traditional broadcasting strategies.

4. Referencing cultural topics is good – but only in the short term.

There were a number of controversial events that happened during the world cup, with brands jumping on the bandwagon and referencing them in their promotions. Whilst drawing on the interest that such controversial occurrences can generate, doing this in the long run can damage a brands reputation, as can overreacting (for example, Adidas removing Suarez from its global campaign after the biting incident, yet choosing not to terminate his contract altogether).