With the World Cup winding down, which brand sponsors will have done the best? And what will have been the key to their success?
There’s no shortage of sensational reporting on the sponsors. For example, there’s an interesting report here on the buzz between Nike and Adidas (the official sponsor). Observation: the PR success for Adidas from the Jabulani ball has, like the flight of the ball, been erratic and unpredictable, but probably a net positive for Adidas.
Meanwhile, other sponsors fled like rats off a sinking ship to get away from the implosion of the French national team. Sacre (les) Bleus!
Non-sponsor brands also saw their share of action. In a provocative tale of ambush marketing, 36 female Dutch fans were detained for wearing orange miniskirts, evidently a clear symbol of Bavaria beer (NOT an official sponsor, by the way).
But beyond all the buzz and antics, what characterizes great, enduring world cup sponsorship marketing?
It’s safe to say that strong integrated marketing is at the core. Plus, you’d expect vivid experiential and compelling social components. Moreover, in a global event such as the world cup, you’d want to see worldwide activation of the sponsorship. Delivering all of this is a tall order. In most cases, sponsors will have enlisted the creative brains, arms and legs of an entire roster of agencies to pull it off.
Looking behind the curtain, most client-agency models fall short. Aligning a multitude of agency partners to play ball and truly collaborate–acting as if part of one team–is very difficult given competing incentives, inertia and agency allegiance.
That’s why we were fascinated to understand how Coca-Cola set up what it called “Red Lounge” to carry off its sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics several years ago. Coke established this different-in-kind agency structure to go well beyond the coordination that clients usually settle for when working with multiple agency partners. Coke was shooting for deeper collaboration, hoping that it could get it’s agency partners to build on each others’ ideas, and get to that magical 1 + 1 = 3 land.
In effect, what Red Lounge did is establish a common identity among different participating agency personnel–an identity that trumped the allegiance and incentives of any individual on the team toward his or her home agency. Coke used a clever mix of structure, individual and joint incentives, team leadership, and psychological techniques to engender this “one team” kind of environment. This led the agency personnel to check their competitive baggage at the door, and partner to create and activate world-class marketing. As a result, by most accounts, the Olympic marketing effort was a huge success for Coke.
We’re eagerly watching to see how Coke performs when all is said and done at the 2010 World Cup. Good luck to the sponsor brands in the final days of the Cup.
By the way, my pick for tournament winner? The country where the rain stays mainly on the plain. If I get that wrong, you can bet I’ll blame Paul, the prognosticating German octopus. No kidding.
MLC Members, check out the Coca-Cola Red Lounge case study, which is part of a larger research study on creating high return agency partnerships (the Coke case study starts on p. 24). The study also includes casework from companies like Clorox and Mars.
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