Two months before the start of the World Cup, ESPN and Univision are close to selling out their advertising inventory around the live games.
One of the reasons clearly is the limited ad inventory available during live matches. The networks are selling six commercial pods around each game: two before the game’s start, two at halftime, and two after the final whistle.
“Once they fill in the inventory with official sponsors, there isn’t much to sell,” said Jay Baum, managing partner of ad agency Mediacom.
But ESPN is convinced that another reason for the advertiser interest is a programming strategy that incorporates live games, multiple platforms and re-aired condensed versions of the games during prime time. Up to 40 percent of ad revenue that ESPN has booked around the event comes from platforms other than linear television.
The strategy presents a marked difference from how NBC dealt with the Olympics, when it broadcast many events on tape delay to drive prime-time television ratings. In the last several months, John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president of content, has been openly critical of that strategy, saying that ESPN would not show events in the same way.
Under ESPN’s direction, the 2010 World Cup will be broadcast live on TV and broadband and re-aired in prime time. The effort will be watched closely domestically and internationally because ESPN is expected to compete with NBC for the media rights to the 2014 and 2016 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee is expected to consider both programming strategy and financial guarantees when it selects a partner, and ESPN’s live and re-air strategy contrasts greatly with NBC’s tape-delay strategy during previous Olympic Games.
According to ESPN’s ad sales team, World Cup advertisers are interested in more than just the games and more than just television. ESPN The Magazine’s World Cup preview will have more advertising than any other issue for the year. Radio and broadband also are well sold. And ESPN Deportes, which holds the U.S.’s Portuguese-language rights, is sold out.
“We are near sellout across the board,” said Ed Erhardt, ESPN’s president of customer marketing and sales. “Obviously, we still have deals out there, but we’re in good shape.”
ESPN has sold advertising packages to FIFA partners Adidas, Sony, Hyundai and Anheuser-Busch, and to non-FIFA partners AT&T, Cisco, EA Sports, Heineken, U.S. Marines, M&M Mars and others.
Erhardt said ESPN’s sales team benefited from the success of the Vancouver Olympics. The event averaged a 13.9 rating over 17 days and spurred several advertisers to make buys during the World Cup.
“It raised the awareness of how a world event will captivate fans and a marketplace and that live sports whenever and wherever they’re on will attract big audiences,” Erhardt said. “We noticed a little extra interest across the marketplace when the Olympics was about three quarters of the way through.”
But several of FIFA’s biggest, U.S.-based sponsors, like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Visa, haven’t bought significant inventory on ESPN yet. Erhardt said he is hopeful Visa will become an advertiser.
Coke and McDonald’s plan to activate against the World Cup primarily on Univision, and have made advertising commitments to the Spanish-language network.
Sales also have been brisk in Latin America and Brazil, where ESPN International is broadcasting World Cup news and supporting programs. ESPN has signed 11 World Cup sponsors in Brazil, where it has World Cup rights, and its TV and digital properties in the rest of Latin America, where it is airing ancillary World Cup coverage, are at sellout levels, Erhardt said.
ESPN offered U.S. and Latin American advertisers the opportunity to make additional buys on a country-by-country basis.
ESPN paid $100 million for the rights to the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, and the relative sales success has encouraged ESPN about the value of the 2014 World Cup, Erhardt said. He added, “As this country becomes more diverse, this property makes more and more sense for us in the future.”
