Who is sponsoring the 2010 FIFA World Cup?

July 5, 2010 - PRLog -- At the beginning of the FIFA World Cup, we noticed there were quite a few articles written about the Nike versus Adidas advertising campaigns. On the back of this, we decided to devise a survey to gauge awareness of the sponsorship of the world cup. There were five categories – Airlines, Automotive, Beer, Electrical and Sport – and the survey takers had to pick the brand they believed were the sponsors out of a small selection of major brands. In theory, the brands that are supporting the 2010 World Cup should have attracted the highest amount of votes, thereby reiterating how beneficial sponsoring a major event such as the World Cup is.

The most anticipated result from the poll was the sports brand category. Nike and their ‘Write Your Future’ campaign has been a huge success both offline and online. Their adverts include appearances from Rooney, Ronaldo, Drogba and Ronaldino which generated more buzz than Adidas going into the World Cup according to Nielsen. Nike had 30.2% share of social networking sites compared to Adidas with 14.4%. However, a new table was released which covered the period 11th to 25th June (when the World Cup had commenced) and revealed that Adidas had leap-frogged Nike with their Star Wars-themed campaign. This was also reflected in the results of Brand’s survey. 60.9% of voters knew that Adidas were the official sponsors of the FIFA World Cup. Nike did come in second place with 34.8% of the votes.

Most of the other sponsors all came top in their categories with a huge majority. Sony topped the electrical category with 52.2% whilst second placed Panasonic received 17.4%, Hyundai obtained 34.8% of the votes with BMW close behind with 16% and Emirates were the resounding winners with 58.3%.

In the beer category, it was a close call, with Budweiser received 47.8% of the votes whilst Carlsberg received 43.5%. Seemingly there may have been confusion as Carlsberg were the sponsors of the England team and have more established links with English football. Similar to Nike, Carlsberg had a massive advertising campaign leading up to the World Cup. Their ‘If Carlsberg did team talks’ campaign had a lot of TV coverage and featured heavily online before the 2010 World Cup. Carlsberg also held a road show which travelled across the UK and gave fans an opportunity to meet some of their England 2010 World Cup heroes. This reveals how crucial a well-orchestrated marketing campaign is to the major brands that are competing against one another to win their own sponsorship World Cup.

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