brand-e

By Simon Fuller. England’s dismal display against Germany in the World Cup might have come as a shock to some, but another surprise might be just how little UK consumers knew about brand involvement in FIFA’s event heading into the competition.
Brand research outfit Echo conducted a study into public awareness of brand sponsorship around the tournament, with the result that many brands failed to score – out of eight of the tournament’s big backers, among them Sony, McDonald’s and Visa, only Coca-Cola was identified as a sponsor by more than half of respondents.

Budweiser, official FIFA World Cup sponsor and sponsor of the USA team, was the brand that made the most of its World Cup involvement last week, with UK Internet searches for beer spiking some 25% between the week ending 12th and the one ending 19th June. And Budweiser’s Experian Hitwise World Cup Brands Index score [...]

By Hugh Jordan. England’s woeful performance in the World Cup so far is enough to turn anyone to drink. Luckily, the team at tech agency Caffeinehit are on hand to help, having designed a real-time drinking game iPhone app for World Cup games.
So, how does Drinking World Cup work?
“There are set forfeits for things like corners, free kicks, cards and penalties,” says Andy Ashburner, part of the Caffeine Hit team which developed the app. “And there are additional forfeits for unexpected real-time events.”

No doubt you’ve watched Nike’s Write The Future video already. But have you seen the Write The Future crayons? Yes, we did say ‘crayons’. Wieden + Kennedy tasked US artist Diem Chau with carving a half-dozen footballers out of wax crayons to make 11 pretty cool boxes of World Cup Crayola.
The six players in wax [...]

Yes, we bring you yet more football, though this time from an Asian perspective. You see, with North and South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand from APAC all qualifying for World Cup 2010, brands from the region have really got into gear for the tournament.
“In China, CCTV is said to have paid in excess of the S$292.7 million it shelled out for coverage of the 2002 tournament,” says Xtreme Information in its Insight 2101 – Football Matters report. “Asian broadcasters such as iCable in Hong Kong and SingTel and Starhub in Singapore, are hoping to see a considerable return on their investment in terms of advertising revenue and, in some cases, subscription numbers.”

UK brand consultancy The Brand Union is projecting the feed from its The Footwall Twitter account onto the four-storey façade of its London offices. Consumers are encouraged to participate by sending messages about the World Cup, with the show beginning at sundown every evening.
“It’s about relevance,” says Paul Wood, account director for The Brand Union. [...]

Americans are getting into football… apologies, soccer. It must be true because US brand AT&T has taken the time to come up a World Cup augmented reality game which resides in a banner ad. Wannabe strikers have the opportunity to head the ball into the back of the net via their webcams. Five shots to [...]

You know that football is more than a mere ball game. And the World Cup ball – the Jabulani – is more than a ball (especially as the best players in the world seem to have problems scoring goals with it). So you probably want to know how adidas makes these spherical items. Yes, you [...]