Keep it simple, stupid

All the World Cup matches give me the opportunity to look at how the sponsors try to get inside our living room. Anyone who watches football with me will know that I have at least as much to say about the advertising hoardings around the field as I do about the football itself. The often poor use of those hoardings has become one of my pet hates in the past year. So as far as I'm concerned, that makes it an excellent subject for the last column of this year.

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You might think that a massive investment on the scale of the sponsoring of the FIFA World Cup would go hand-in-hand with making fully informed strategic choices. You want to make the most of it, don't you? But even with a captive worldwide audience it's still possible to make questionable choices. The wrong colour scheme (light-blue lettering on a white background?!), hazy logos, empty slogans, senseless advertising messages, confusing brand/sub-brand names. I've seen it all.

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Let's start with the basics: how do those pitch-side advertising hoardings actually work? It's quite simple. The more your advertisement stands out during the match, the more people make the link between football and your brand. And that positive association, in turn, serves as an incentive to consumers faced with an in-store choice to go for your brand. So a sponsoring message at the side of the field has just one goal: it must contribute to sponsor recognition.

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That also means that things that don't have a direct connection to brand recognition have no place on pitch-side advertising. What about KIA, which tried to tell us during the World Cup about the latest electric model they've introduced by displaying a complicated product name and an indistinct moving picture of a dashboard, in the process wasting a large proportion of their sponsorship budget.

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I regularly talk to FIFA and UEFA sponsors on the effectiveness of their advertising hoardings. And when, for the umpteenth time, I repeat my plea for simple advertising hoardings, I usually sense resistance from marketing executives and sponsoring managers. The sponsorship has to be in line with a corporate campaign or support the brand purpose, so they usually want to share that message at the edge of the field. I can understand that, because sponsoring is ideally suited to telling the story behind a brand. Just don't do it on the advertising hoardings!

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To reinforce my mission for their proper use, we have recently subjected the design of advertising hoardings to a thorough international study once more. What is striking, what do TV viewers find attractive, what do they remember and what do they forget? And do Chinese viewers have different preferences to Mexican viewers? We discovered that hoardings in a colour that contrasts with the pitch are the best way to grab the attention. And those watching the football generally remember brands that display a large and clear logo: nothing more. Oh yeah, and moving pictures work better than stills. That's how easy it can be.

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The first thing I do in 2023 will be to share the results of that study in a way that is convincing to the sponsorship world. That way, not one sponsor will have an excuse for poor pitch-side advertising any more. An added benefit is that I won't have to bother you any more in 2023 with my grumbling about the poor quality of advertising hoardings. That means I've already bagged my first new year's resolution.

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