World Cup Corporate Winners and Losers

An interesting article on fastcompany.com yesterday reports on the World Cup’s corporate winners and losers.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Earlier we speculated that Visa might not see as much of a bump as it would have hoped because of diminishing returns post-Vancouver Olympics.  But Visa is reporting a 74% increase in card use in South Africa during the tournament. During the Olympics, Visa encourages all of its vendors to display a Visa logo, and their marketing centers around the Visa card being the only card a visitor can use during the Games. However, word from people attending the 2010 World Cup is that Visa did much less of this self-promotion in South Africa. This leads one to wonder whether the bump is the result of Visa’s sponsorship activations, or because historically low digital penetration or Visa use in South Africa made them ripe for improvement.
• The good news for FIFA is that 19.4 million Americans watched the U.S. – Ghana match. Viewership in the U.S. this World Cup cycle increased 41% over the 2006 World Cup.  No doubt FIFA executives are thrilled, as they have been trying to penetrate the U.S. market for years now.  Our own research shows that FIFA’s online community has grown 273% since the start of the World Cup. Perhaps FIFA will continue to use digital tools to capitalize off of this increased interest in the States.
• Twitter use peaked at over 3,000 tweets per SECOND during the World Cup.  This is proof positive that Twitter is a legitimate, captive audience that sponsors should be taking advantage of.

There are more statistics and a great update on the Nike-Adidas debate (which we covered here) in the article.  And of course, stay tuned for our Virilion buzz wrap up soon to come!

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