We are very excited about the World Cup in the Podium Creative office. Excited about the football, excited about the build-up, and, as avid marketers, excited about the adverts.

Far from ruining the event like commercialism does for Christmas, marketing, sponsorship and advertising is part and parcel of the World Cup. I actually look forward to seeing the adverts, and watching how different companies go about positioning themselves around the time of the World Cup.

They can broadly be split into three main categories, as follows and below I’ll have a look at examples of each in turn:

1)      The official sponsors

2)      The guerrilla brands

3)      The ‘scrambling for relevance’ brands

The official sponsors have, of course, spent millions of pounds to get themselves on the roster, and you’d better believe they’re going to tell you about it.

The sponsorship opportunities are myriad and varied. Pitchside advertising, logo-carrying, mascot-endorsing, blimp-riding, corporate box-dwelling… official sponsors are everywhere.

It’s commercialism at its very finest. It doesn’t matter how relevant a brand is to the tournament. Whether you’re selling cars, watches or fast food, you can be an official sponsor if you pay enough.

I always enjoy the pre-tournament ‘unveiling of the ball’. We have just seen Adidas unveil the tournament football amid the usual claims that it’ll be more accurate than ever before. This is traditionally followed by the footballers moaning that it floats like a beach ball and is impossible to achieve any precision with it. (In fairness, this year’s effort is apparently, much better than the disaster in South Africa.)

This year’s winner has to be McDonalds, a brand so ubiquitous it has the confidence to pull together a single, amazing advert that doesn’t once feature any of their products. It’s high-budget, great to watch, and really makes me fancy a double cheeseburger.

The guerrilla brands are those that attempt to circumvent the rules, securing themselves some tournament-related profile-raising for far less than it would have cost them otherwise. Paddy Power famously did this with Nicklas Bendtner during the Euro 2012 competition, as he pulled his shorts down to reveal some green, branded underwear. The company agreed to pay Bendtner’s €100k fine from UEFA, presumably because the value of coverage they secured far outweighed that.

However, it would be remiss of me as a blogger not to mention, with an accompanying photo, the finest guerrilla marketing of all time: the Dutch beer brand who sent a busload of attractive ladies to the match in branded Orange dresses. Again, FIFA weren’t happy and gave the girls their marching orders, but not before they secured global coverage for Bavaria. I can’t imagine why picture desks across the world were so keen to run this story…

Some brands have nothing to do with football, and can’t stretch to sponsorship packages, but still, scramble for relevance. A special mention at this stage to Subway for recruiting England’s number nine, Daniel Sturridge, to appear in one of the finest examples of crowbarring football into an advert, at any cost.

If you want to talk to us about whether our content-driven PR, SEO and marketing techniques can help your business, please feel free to give us a shout. Or, if you want to discuss the relative merits of the 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 systems and the possible return to fashion of the 3-5-2, I’d be only too happy to discuss that as well. [email protected]

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