World cup: R2bn free advertising bonanza

The 2010 FIFA World Cup organisers believe that a cumulative 28 billion viewers will watch the 64 games and during each game official broadcasters have to allow FIFA 14 minutes of airtime. Assuming that only two minutes of this is devoted to promoting South African tourism and investment opportunities, as FIFA has promised, the advertising value amounts to roughly R1.5 billion.

Sweet tweets

Then one needs to add in all the newspaper and magazine coverage, online publicity and, as the head of LOC marketing Derek Carstens told me, the 30-minute opening and closing ceremonies and, most importantly, all the celebrity players who will be constantly tweeting to their millions of fans or updating their FaceBook pages. On his arrival in South Africa, Brazil's Kaka (@realkaka) sent out a tweet on how great the vibe was here. That kind of publicity, said Carstens, is priceless. I agree.

On top of that, major global broadcasters such as BBC World, CNN and Sky have already started devoting considerable airtime not only to the football but also to where the world cup is being played.

Add all this together and one can quite easily end up with publicity value in advertising terms of around R2 billion.

Insight or insane?

But, bear in mind that 28 billion cumulative viewers amounts to the equivalent of every man woman and child on earth, roughly seven billion of them, watching four world cup games. Which suggests that FIFA might perhaps be living in cloud cuckoo land.

Local media experts, veteran Dick Reed and The MediaShop's man in Cape Town Heiner Kuhnel, reckon that Fortune magazine probably came up with a more realistic figure of 125 million viewers a game. On that basis they say, the total cumulative TV audience will be in the region of 8 billion at a push, which in turn translates into R432-million-worth of free TV advertising, based on SABC1 ad rates.

Adding in newspaper, magazine, social media and global network coverage, that figure could probably double to about R800 million.

Even this lower number is 10 times the average amount of money that the International Marketing Council would spend annually on promoting South Africa to the rest of the world.

But, a big but

Whichever way one looks at it - South Africa will get a massive dose of international publicity over the next five weeks and in spite of SARS suggesting that the country will not make a profit from this world cup, the long-term effect of this tsunami of publicity for the country will surely be a huge boost in tourism and investment.

But, all of this will depend on the world cup going off without any major incidents. It will depend on trade unionists not using the world cup to blackmail employers. It will depend on our ability to protect visitors from crime. It will depend on SA showing that it is capable of hosting the world greatest event without making the world's greatest cock-up of it.

The country's massive investment in the world cup will certainly, in my opinion, have an eventual positive return if we get it right. Ironically, however, getting it right will depend on our ability to contain those selfish people among us for whom national pride comes a far second to self-interest.

For more:

• Bizcommunity.com: Post-2010: what is in store for media owners?
  
• Brandchannel.com: World Cup Ambush Marketing Score Card