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Five major World Cup partners – Sony, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Emirates and Hyundai – are failing to associate their brands online with the competition, which opens in Johannesburg and Cape Town this coming Friday, according to Tamar.
The search and social conversion agency says its Sports Index research points to there being a huge opportunity to link sponsoring brands with popular World Cup search terms, and this trend will grow exponentially as the kick-off date nears. However, few of the major partners are working to ensure that they are found online for related search engine queries.
“Of the big five FIFA partners, only Emirates and Adidas are beginning to rank for popular online search terms, but even these attempts will not be driving people to their websites and key brand messages as their search visibility is low – meaning that their websites will not appear on the first few pages of the search results returned by engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing,” Tamar says. “For brands such as Coca-Cola, Hyundai and Sony, the visibility from natural search matches is non-existent currently.
“We were genuinely shocked by the research into the big brands’ search strategies,” says Neil Jackson, search strategy director at Tamar. “These companies all have the legal rights to use liberally the trademarked FIFA World Cup terminology. There is a huge volume of traffic surrounding these terms with massive spikes coming up in the near future.
“These spikes are wonderful opportunities for brand engagement but it seems that the FIFA partners have not realised the effectiveness of using search for their campaigns this year. These are all trusted brands with huge global investments in marketing, both online and offline, yet our findings indicate that they are failing to make the most of the unique online opportunities.”