Now that the Round of 16 is over and we are down to the final 8 teams that will be playing in the Quarterfinals of the World Cup – most of the marketing that has accompanied the games has been played out and it’s a good time to try and look for some lessons from the International phenomenon that is the World Cup. To help, here is my round up of 10 of the most interesting marketing campaigns from this World Cup as well as some marketing lessons that they offer:

#10 – ESPN3 Live Streaming

Offering live streaming for sporting events is certainly not new, but the way that ESPN has integrated their streaming with cable providers has been excellent. For many soccer fans, watching the World Cup Live might have been their first experience at a "pay for streaming" service online. Hulu is paid for by ads, and YouTube is omnipresent – but ESPN3 took the riskier step of integrating with cable providers. By doing so, they not only managed to prove their value to their cable provider partners/subscribers – they also managed to create a great user experience because they didn’t force consumers to pay again for something they were already paying for through their home cable subscription. Big win for ESPN.

#9 – Coca-Cola History Of Celebration
Coke is an official sponsor of the World Cup and has the stadiums plastered with their logo as you would expect. Continuing with their theme of happiness that was so nicely brought to life through viral videos such as "The Happiness Machine,", their World Cup spot focuses on the story of Roger Milla and his dance of celebration during the 1990 World Cup that sparked a revolution in goal celebrations (as the ad claims). The video is set to the official theme song of the FIFA World Cup 2010 and the voice over is from an announcer with a South African accent (nice touch). The last shot of Roger Milla in the stands enjoying a Coke while the voiceover talks about how he "showed the world how to live" is pure World Cup melodramatic magic.

#8 – KIA Motors South Africa
As the official automobile sponsor for the World Cup, KIA had fertile ground to do a lot of great things around the World Cup. Unfortunately, their actual effort seemed uncoordinated and confusing – with KIA Motors South Africa running a promotion all about offering an exclusive experience to people who engaged with the South African page or Twitter account, while the global marketing team seemed to focus on the new Soul car with a 1 minute video (embedded below) asking "what’s your soul app?" and randomly talking about anti-gravity apps. The US KIA Twitter page doesn’t even mention anything about the World Cup, the global Facebook page offers disconnected polls and the pieces of this campaign just seem out of sync in the unique way that can easily happen when global teams work in their silos and never collaborate. One commenter on their YouTube video summed it up best in their response to KIA’s question … "My soul app is the one that blocks these kind of ads." Ouch.

#7 – Cisco Around The World
Continuing their Human Network campaign* Cisco uses an engaging ad showing a soccer juggling trick they call the "around the world" that spreads from country to country through young soccer fans watching a video and trying to recreate that moment. As a kid, I remember watching Jürgen Klinsmann in 1994 score an amazing goal against South Koreans and spending months practicing and trying to perfect the same move. Cisco managed to tap that moment that many soccer players and fans could relate to, and demonstrate how their global network makes sharing moments like that possible in a faster and more real way than ever before. (*Full Disclosure – Cisco is an Ogilvy client, but I did not work on this campaign).

#6 – CristianoRonaldo.com

Voted the FIFA World Player Of The Year in 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo (and his often photographed abs) may also be the best looking player in this year’s World Cup … or so I’m told. To capitalize on the attention, he relaunched his website during the World Cup and last week I got a launch announcement from a PR team announcing his new site as a place where they would be "pulling dialogue between Cristiano and his 5 million fans on Facebook and Twitter." After Portugal lost a close Round of 16 match against their neighboring rival Spain, Ronaldo was featured heavily in the news for his comments about feeling like a "broken man." Unfortunately, he isn’t sharing this despair in any sort of dialogue with his fans and his Twitter feed has been silent since before the Spain match. The lesson it brings to light is the central pitfall in creating this "revolutionary" new model for dialogue between a celebrity superstar and his fans: the whole thing falls apart if the superstar just doesn’t feel like talking.

#5 – CNN + FourSquare World Cup Promotion
CNN jumped into the geolocation bandwagon around the World Cup and launched a promotion with Foursquare where they are offering special badges to people who check in at locations within South Africa as well as at viewing parties at various locations around the world. Though they are not broadcasting the games, this is an interesting chance at experimentation for the brand and if it works I imagine we will begin to see this used by other Turner Network channels like TNT around college basketball, as well as potentially around large newsmaking events that draw a crowd at viewing parties as well, such as national elections.

#4 – Bud United House Party
You have to give Budweiser credit for not giving up on the BudTV idea even though their idea of a 24 hour online network fell flat. Around the FIFA World Cup, they leveraged their sponsorship to create the Bud United house where they invite one person from every one of the 32 finalist teams to live in a house together during the World Cup. The only rules were that when your team was eliminated from the World Cup, you were too. The result is an engaging online reality show that has a great premise, interesting content and a unique sponsorship activation. The only problem to see with this campaign is that they focused all their TV budget on running the same ad over and over where the fans try to distract the soccer player with an mosaic image of beer in the stands. If they used some of that budget to drive TV audiences to check out Bud United, they would have likely increased their engagement dramatically.

#3 – Pepsi "Oh Africa"

Pepsi was one of the sponsors that some felt "ambushed" the games to take away attention from the official soft drink sponsor (Coke) and got great buzz for their TV spot and viral video featuring people making a soccer pitch for several soccer superstars to play against kids in a soccer challenge. The not so subtle message is that Africa can achieve great things (like defeat international soccer stars) if her people can work together.

#2 – Nike Write The Future
Nike’s online long form ad with the tagline of "Write The Future" can only be described as epic in how it manages to take all the top tier talent they sponsor and roll out a story that not only talks of their impact on the game and culture, but how what happens on the World Cup stage often does write the future for all of us. The World Cup is special in its significance to the world and watching this ad helps you understand and live that. If there is one ad most closely associated with this World Cup, it has to be the Write the Future campaign. Adidas still had a strong global showing  and for "real soccer players," Adidas remains the brand most focused on soccer and stands to realize big revenue gains from merchandising as a result of the games. They made the uniforms and the often debated . But for Nike to grab just a bit of the spotlight through great creative and storytelling isn’t bad for a brand that was not the official sponsor.

#1 – Brand South Africa
After the games finish and the world turns its attention to the next big sporting event, the biggest winner from these games may very well be Brand South Africa. The country has had an ambitious nation branding and marketing effort in place since 2002 – and one that in part led to their selection as the host nation for Africa’s first FIFA World Cup. The games have gone off perfectly and the biggest controversies to date have been the Jabulani ball and the inconsistent officiating – both having little to do with the host country. Using music and dance as a way into their culture, coverage of the games online and on television were filled with African rhythms and clearly stood out from anything else. Though the South African’s didn’t progress in the tournament as far as they liked, the country invited the world to their doorstep, brought out the vuvuzelas, did a disika dance and showed the world what Africa was truly capable of.

Amongst a World Cup filled with good and bad marketing lessons, South Africa deserves to stand at the top of the list with pride. Good marketing helped them get selected to host the games, and great marketing will help them inspire people to visit and invest in their country long after the final match is played and a champion is crowned.

Comments

The Leaderboard displays a running competition to see which country has the most passionate fans, and allows them to support their favorite teams and encourage their friends to support them. You can sort it by passion rank, popularity, intensity, region, or group.

"With the help of Facebook’s global World Cup broadcast partners like Univision and ESPN, fans can share status updates and comments with their friends while watching the events live via Facebook’s Live Stream social plugin," the rep says.

"Fans can also build their own dream team with the EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars game on Facebook," she adds. "And for the giving fan, you can sign up to support 1GOAL, the World Cup charity that aims to ensure education for all, and stay connected with them on Facebook."

On a related note, we also received an email touting Watercooler’s Epic Goal as the "best soccer game on Facebook." I can’t personally vouch for this, but in the spirit of things, it seemed worth passing on. This review looks at some different ones.

The World Cup’s 30 days of soccer began on Friday, and there will no doubt be plenty more related searching in the coming weeks. Google Consumer Operations Strategist Jaime Forman-Lau says:

It’s often said that football is a global sport, and that’s certainly true in search. Searches for [world cup 2010], [copa mundial] and [?? ?] are all spiking, although overall World Cup buzz seems to be off to a slower start in 2010 than in the months leading up to the 2006 tournament, based on global trends for queries like [world cup] and [fifa world cup]. India is the #1 country searching for [fifa world cup schedule], [fifa 2010 schedule] and similar queries. And as the match-up between anglophone rivals England and USA approaches, searches for [england world cup] continue to far surpass interest in [usa world cup].

Most of us will be watching the matches on TV in pubs and living rooms, but a few lucky spectators will get to watch in person in South Africa. Searches for [world cup tickets] peaked in mid-April, and have since declined. But whether home or abroad, we’re all searching for the best way to show support for our team. Searches for [world cup decoration] have risen, and a glimpse at the Dutch shows queries for [oranje versiering] (“orange decoration”; orange is the Netherland’s national color) and [orange] have risen sharply for the last three months, as they have in 2006 and 2008 for the World Cup and European Cup.

Insights for Search shows a great level of interest in Cristiano Ronaldo and some other stars of the sport:

These are the players provided in Google’s own Insights for Search presentation. As I am not a soccer guy (I’m more of a fan of the other football), I can’t get too specific, but if you want to check out search activity on any other players, you can do so using the tool yourself. I’m sure there will be plenty of them showing up on Google Trends as well (not to mention Twitter).

"We’ve built this community for our users to act as an aggregate of the flurry of World Cup activity not only across MySpace but across the entire web including videos, live status updates and tweets via Kosmix, World Cup content from Fox Sports and Univision and much more," MySpace Manager of Corporate Communications Jessica Bass tells WebProNews.

The MySpace World Cup Profile includes: 

- Real time tweetbeat via Kosmix

- Teams specific badges for users to support their favorites and automatically appears in the user’s stream

- Live matches and world cup news via Univision

- Opportunity to sign the petition to bring the World Cup to the US

- World Cup videos, photos, fan forums and soccer related social games

MySpace is shifting its focus to content more these days, and this World Cup profile is certainly an example of that. Though on the site, MySpace still touts itself as "a place for friends" to new users, its announcements are generally geared more toward content lately, and News Corp. COO Chase Carey was recently quoted as saying flat out, "MySpace is a content site."

That’s not to say friends aren’t still a big part of the equation. When you choose your badge to "show your team spirit", it updates your status for your friends to see.

 The game, EA Sports FIFA Superstars, was developed by Playfish and will be available on additional social networks soon.

"We are leveraging our soccer expertise with the experience of our partners at Playfish to create a casual soccer game for a broader audience," said Matt Bilbey, vice president of soccer, EA Sports.

"Soccer fans have a voracious appetite for their sport so we are creating interactive soccer entertainment in new ways and on new platforms to meet the interest," continued Bilbey. "We are excited to broaden our reach from the console that touches our core audience of 10-20 million fans to the hundreds of millions of soccer fans and casual gamers using social networks."

FIFA Superstars will feature EA Sports soccer licenses for 30 leagues, 500 teams and 15,000 players. Users will be able to create a fantasy club side by collecting or trading players, challenging others in competing leagues or searching for leader boards to compete. 

Players will also be able to predict the outcomes of games in the 2010 FIFA World Cup to win in-game coins.

Soccer Site Scores Traffic With Beckham

The increase in traffic was up 117 percent over the previous year. The growth in traffic can be attributed to the U.S. arrival of former England captain, David Beckham, who signed with the LA Galaxy at the beginning of the year. The former Manchester United star is reported to have signed a deal worth around $250 million.

At the end of 2006, traffic to mlsnet.com had fallen to 230,000 unique visitors, down from 478,000 in July. When the LA Galaxy announced the signing of Beckham in January, traffic spiked to 808,000 unique visitors, a 252 percent month-on month increase.

When Beckham made his debut as a Galaxy player on July 13 and playing debut on July 21, worldwide traffic to the site jumped to over one million unique visitors.

 Bob Ivins, EVP of International Markets at comScore, said, "David Beckham’s impact on the MLS league’s official website has been enormous. The player has single handedly doubled the number of visitors to mlsnet.com versus last year, which let’s not forget, was a World Cup year."

"When you look at the huge traffic increase that occurred in January just because of the announcement of his signing for the club, the figures speak for themselves. If anyone can raise the profile of soccer in the States, David Beckham is undoubtedly the man to do it. "

From the Joga site…

Joga is a place to meet other soccer players, share your own soccer experiences and enjoy photos and videos from around the world.

Membership is by invite only. Let’s hope this is actually used by soccer fans as opposed to criminals.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

You can get an invite by leaving your email, or by getting invited by another Joga member. A Google Video is even built into the homepage.

The few details we have:

The help center discusses city and athlete communities created by Nike for pro athletes. You can upload videos and photo albums, and create a soccer dream team (“Starting 11″).

Welcome to Joga – the community for soccer players dedicated to keeping the game beautiful.

Joga is a place to meet other soccer players, share your own soccer experiences and enjoy photos and videos from around the world.

Join us and help remind the world how the game was meant to be played.

Play beautiful

Joga is unique, because it’s an organically growing network of trusted friends. It is one of a kind network that focuses solely on a common interest around the game of soccer. Joga will help you connect to people who share the same passion for the game and also access exclusive content around athlete profiles, video clips and photos.

Joga is an online community created by Google and Nike for anyone anywhere in the world who shares a love for soccer, the world’s most popular sport. Joga is about getting to know your fellow fans; creating games and clubs; accessing athletes from Nike; and enjoying video clips and photos (you can even upload your own). You can strengthen existing friendships and begin new ones, join a wide variety of professional athletes and soccer communities, and even create your own to discuss soccer, exchange tips on the coolest moves, browse through various pitches worldwide, and plan your next game.

But most of all, Joga is about “Joga Bonito” – Portuguese for “play beautiful.” Are you ready to start down the path of soccer bliss? Join us, and show the world what playing beautiful means to you.

(via Digg)

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

Such is this glimpse of the artificially intelligent future, a goal espoused by Georgia Tech doctorate student Alan Wagner at the 2005 RoboCup US Open at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Of course, when he said that, it was while observing a pack of puppy robot dogs bounding up and down a much smaller field, popping goals with their noses.

The RoboCup is a worldwide scholastic field laboratory, held in Germany and Japan as well. There are five events where student programmers can test their inputs, including a simulation search and rescue event.

The extraordinary thing about these robots is that they are not remote controlled by their creators. They are “free-thinking,” environment adjusting, task-programmed machines that do it all on their own.

“RoboCup is primarily organized to drive software that will make really aware robots possible. Soccer provides a really nice testing environment. Everyone understands soccer so we don’t have to explain what they’re trying to do,” RoboCup U.S. Open Chairman Tucker Balch

The capabilities of the robots increase every year, and teams from around the world bring their best innovations. The Germans, according to Wagner, are a fearsome lot, devoting quite a bit of time and resources to the endeavor.

Nevertheless, in spite of good intentions, it’s well known that true-lasting success with the search engines, (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) is through a Theme-Based Keyword Focused Content site; which beats a mini-site and Door-way pages combined, anytime.

That is because a mini-site is not a viable concept for the average webmaster or affiliate, selling products of their own – or for a merchant partner. Lets look at these concepts.

What is a Theme-Based Keyword Focused Content Site? What is is a Mini-Site? And, What is a Gateway Page?

A theme-based keyword focused content site, is based upon a theme where every page focuses upon a single topic that is related to the theme. For example

Let us say that your theme is soccer. Then, the theme-base related web pages will be about soccer and would include

MLS Soccer – the soccer professional league in USA FIFA – the international soccer federation World Cup – Soccer’s international world tournament The Euro Cup – European soccer’s tournament Copa America – Latin America soccer’s tournament Soccer Mom’s Soccer Reviews Soccer Paraphernalia Etc Etc.

Each of the above will be a specific topic, and each topical page is a “Keyword Content Focused Page. A theme-based site could grow well over 200 pages, each on a different topic, all related to the site’s central theme (soccer). The sum total of all the information forms the content of your site.

Best of all, a tightly focused theme-base site scores well at the search engines for hundreds of soccer-related keywords that will indefinitely drive unlimited targeted traffic to your theme site, selling unlimited soccer related products.

On the other hand, Mini-Sites are small Affiliate sites that focus on selling a single product. It could be a short as one or two pages, and as long as 20 pages. It is composed entirely of a powerful sales letter that drives a visitor to a merchant’s site.

Although, a mini-site is a well intended concept it’s not a viable alternative for most products.. Here are a few of the drawbacks.

1. Hard to build traffic. Because they don’t do well on the search engines. They aren’t built to rank highly on the search engines, or to draw traffic from the most flexible directories.

2. No Credibility. Does not establish credibility in you or your product. A mini-site is a one time straight pitch sales copy; and, no one buys from a straight pitch Web site unless they previously have known, respect, and trust, a well-known authority related to the site’s product.

3. No Diversification. If your mini-site sales copy fails to convert your prospect into a buyer, you’ve most likely lost that visitor for good.

In comparison, the Theme-Based Content Site offers greater opportunities for Affiliate and Webmasters.

1. Traffic The theme-based content site is full of content-rich pages designed to attain a high search engine ranking. On the merits of their valuable content they will draw substantial traffic from the Directories.

2. Credibility: They are great credibility builders because they’re PREselling rather than hard selling.

3. Diversification Each page of a theme-based site may have from 5 and up to 10 links to merchants partner’s sites for different related products..

Now, let us compare a mini-site that is about a certain manufacturer’s soccer balls, versus a theme-based content site that is all about soccer.

A visitor to a mini-site falls within two categories

(S)he needs new soccer balls (S)he doesn’t need new soccer balls

While they may not need new soccer balls, they may need soccer shoes, soccer stockings, a sport’s bag, soccer books, and tapes; maybe even a trip to a soccer camp, or travel arrangements to international soccer events, including hotel and transportation.

Now, suppose your visitor, upon reading your sales pitch for soccer balls says . “No I’ve just got a new ball”, and then returns to the main page for more articles; do you think that placing the same link to those balls in the next article of your mini-site is going to be any more effective? No — your visitor still recently bought a new soccer ball.

Nevertheless, because of the great content with in-context links on your theme-based site, the prospect may develop an interest on soccer related books, products, or services, etc.

The Theme-Based Sites vs. Gateway Pages

Gateway pages are trick sites used to trick the search engines. Generally, low-value pages that score well with the engines but fail to deliver good content. They may get the visitor, but fail to get the click through, the purchase, and the repeat business.

Tricks such as invisible links, lead search engines spiders through a site. Though they initially work, success is of short duration with devastating side effects, such as the visitor disdain, and getting band by the search engines.

A Theme-Based site, on the other hand, will OVER-deliver great content while playing it fair and safe with the search engines by leading their spiders reliably through your site. Their visible links do as good as the Doorway pages hidden links, and will never fade in effectiveness. That is because you are creating real content and not spider bait!

The Theme-Based approach is 100% different. First, you find a theme you know and love, with lots of profitable keywords. Second, research hundreds of profitable keywords (greater demand and less supply) related to your products or services. Third, you build a theme-base content site with great content, that ranks high on the search engines, delivers unlimited PREsold targeted traffic, and gets the click-through to your selling site, or a merchant’s site.

As you can see. The theme-based content focused site wins over a mini-site or gateway pages anytime. The secret of their successful high ranking on the search engines, is that each page is build around a highly profitable keyword content focused page.

The process may seem long, complex and tedious; and, indeed, it could be. Nevertheless, with the right guidance and tools it’s easier than you think. In fact the entire process could be automated.

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