Hisense, a global leader in consumer electronics and home appliances, has launched its FIFA Club World Cup 2025Ô ‘Own the Moment’ campaign. As the tournament’s first official partner, Hisense is building on a seven-year relationship with FIFA and strong momentum in football alliances, while reinforcing its commitment to global sports partnerships as a powerful platform to connect with audiences worldwide.

The ‘Own the Moment’ campaign celebrates the extraordinary passion and unforgettable experiences that football evokes, encouraging fans to fully embrace every thrilling moment of the upcoming competition. Through a series of activations around the tournament, which runs from 14 June until 13 July 2025, Hisense will strengthen the region’s love for football by demonstrating how technology enhances the fan journey, whether at home or inside the stadium.

One of the most successful and globally recognized football clubs on the world stage today, Real Madrid is also among the top contenders for the FIFA Club World Cup 2025™, further strengthening the relevance and excitement of Hisense’s involvement in this year’s tournament.

Hisense’s growing presence in international sport demonstrates a long-term strategy to connect with fans through shared passion points, while continuously advancing its product technology to level up the viewing experience.

As part of its commitment to leadership in innovation, Hisense will provide state-of-the-art technology solutions for the FIFA Club World Cup 2025™, including video assistant referee (VAR) screens and broadcast technology support. This contribution highlights the brand’s pivotal role in enhancing the quality and integrity of the game, delivering an even better experience for players, officials, and fans alike.

This year, with the participation of four Arab teams, viewership in the region is naturally expected to be higher, which in turn, means that advertising spends during this period are also higher.

The biggest chunk of spends is on sponsorship even though revenue through sponsorships for FIFA, fell from $1,629 million in 2014 to $1,450 million in 2018, according to a Nielsen Sports report.

READ: Watch the World Cup in an… Uber?! 

Still, big brands continue to sponsor it. And usually, it pays off.

But, that might not be true in Budweiser’s case.

The brand has been a World Cup sponsor since 1986 – that’s 32 long years.

[Tweet “A 32-year long #WorldCup sponsor might be doing more harm than good this year.”]

This year, however, the FIFA World Cup is seeing participation from four Arab teams, and their players are not in favor of the brand.

READ: WPP needs a new beating heart, says potential Sorrell replacement

When Egypt goalkeeper Mohamed El-Shenawy was awarded the Man of the Match award in the match against Uruguay on June 15, he declined to accept the trophy.

Other than Egypt, Senegal, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Iran – all participating in the World Cup – are also countries that have a majority Muslim population, which abstains from alcohol. Even Germany’s Mesut Ozil and France’s Paul Pogba are Muslim.

Social media users and branding experts have expressed their concern and outrage over FIFA not taking into consideration the religious and cultural sensitivities of the participating countries.

READ: 5 questions with Cannes MENA jury members

Earlier this year, in May, another brand had to put a hold on its marketing campaign for the same reason. The Eichbaum brewery printed the flags of all 32 teams on its bottle caps including Saudi Arabia, which led to multiple complaints on social media leading to the brand eventually pulling the campaign.

Since then, Budweiser told AFP, “We respect the religious beliefs of all players and worked with FIFA to put a process in place for Man of The Match winners who wish to not be featured with the Budweiser branding for religious reasons. Official Man of The Match winners who decline the Bud trophy for religious reasons will still receive full honors, such as Mohamed Elshenawy did, and we congratulate him on his accomplishment.”

And that raises the question of where local audiences are watching it.

Thanks to a new deal the answer might very well be in an Uber.

READ: 74% of digital video budgets are being wasted on this format

Uber has launched its #UberFanVan campaign that allows users to call for an Uber “Fan Van” ahead of a game. Uber will pick one winner every day who, along with two friends, get to live what Uber is calling the “the ultimate match experience”. The van is equipped with a 48-inch TV, food from Uber Eats, a PS4 with football games for half-time and “other awesome swag and footie goodies.”

[Tweet “Would you rather… watch the #WorldCup at home, outside or in an #UberFanVan?”]

Uber is known to unveil special offers such as this on occasions such as Valentine’s Day, for instance. However, with 65 percent GCC residents saying they’d prefer to watch the matches at home – theirs or a friend’s – and with the myriad events and offers at venues around Dubai, it’s unclear how popular the Fan Van will turn out to be.

By Puja Pannum, managing director at Blis MENA

The World Cup: whether it’s vuvuzelas or 7-0 thrashings, it’s the sporting event of the year that is sure, as always, to have a massive global impact. As for brands, it’s a crucial time to drive awareness and sales – Coca Cola, Visa and Adidas, for example, have already partnered with Fifa. Big ad budgets are dedicated to the biggest, most memorable campaigns with great creatives and ‘always on’ strategies which continue throughout the games. So, from a MENA standpoint, how can brands tap into this opportunity using location data to maximize their takings from the beautiful game?

Football to drive footfall

First things first, it’s all about the nifty footwork. If you truly want to harness the power of the World Cup this year, you need to start by understanding as much as you can about your potential customers. You can greatly enhance this process with the help of location data. In many ways, where people go is who they are, and the data which surrounds people’s comings and goings provide a whole wealth of information beyond latitudes and longitudes. Brands looking to understand more about their potential customers can construct whole profiles about consumers from this information and make sure they only approach consumers with what they actually want.

READ: What you need to know about Facebook’s privacy disaster. Again.

Geo-fencing – setting a virtual boundary at a particular physical location and monitoring device IDs that show up there – is one of the key ways of harnessing this information. Geo-fencing sporting arenas and stadiums allow marketers to build segments of potential customers who attend sports events. You could enhance this, for example, by collecting device IDs of consumers actively purchasing sports equipment online, or visiting the FIFA website directly. During Singapore’s 2017 F1 race, for example, Blis set out to measure the effect of the event on local business. The geofencing of race locations allowed the construction of key target audiences, with these device IDs subsequently being monitored at key hotels, casinos, restaurants, and shopping malls. The results were clear, with F1 event spectators boosting business at local restaurants by 173% and local shopping malls by 82%.

But it’s not just the ‘where’s’ and ‘what’s’ that matter, but also the ‘how’s’ and ‘why’s’. When targeting sports fans’ devices, context is key. You’ll want to target them when they are out and about – at shisha cafés, hotels or at sporting venues by identifying and serving ads to your ideal consumers currently within a set distance of single or multiple defined locations. When you know potential consumers are on their feet, your ads will be more likely to drive them into shops. And if they’re at home, don’t just give up – leverage their historical location data and retarget your customer with an ad encouraging them to shop in a particular store next time they are out.

Behavioral data will also help you target an audience for maximum engagement, saving you from wasting valuable budget and turning off customers with things they don’t like, want, or need. For example, you might consider targeting females more whilst a football match is in-play, as their other half may be more distracted by the game.

Creative Football Frenzy

This kind of tailor-made, strategic thinking should also apply to your creative too. To really make the most of the audience data you have at hand, think about how it can be leveraged alongside creative, to reach the right consumer at the right time and place. A degree of awareness around the different stages of the World Cup will go a long way. Creative messages should ebb and flow as intensity and engagement change from first rounds, through to quarter and semi-finals, and of course the all-important World Cup final.

READ: Dear publishers, Google’s got news for you

What’s more, digital marketers need to make sure their creative is every bit as pleasing to the eye as the beautiful game itself. Rich media formats, video and interactive ads should all feature as part of your campaigns. Snapchat, for example, has mastered new technologies such as AR and facial recognition to create immersive ad experiences. Creative filters are especially appealing and can improve brand recall and drive engagement and sharing.

And when it comes to serving your creative ads, meaningful use of location data can help. Think about the context of your audience: which creatives are most appropriate for when potential customers are watching the game in their homes, versus when they are in a café? Dynamic local ads that draw on the specifics of a location (like the weather, or the user’s proximity to a sports venue or outlet) can give your campaign the edge.There is a range of platforms available to marketers to help achieve this. With the right attention to customer profiles, you can fine tune your personalization techniques to deliver the most engaging creative at the right time. In a campaign with adidas, for example, Blis targeted consumers at a local mall browsing for fashion and entertainment content. These consumers were targeted later with rich media advertising relevant to their location – whether near their local Adidas store or relaxing at home. The result was a 22% uplift in footfall, with 226 devices instore on one day of the campaign alone.

Thinking “glocal”  

Last but not least, making a marketing success out of the World Cup will require an international perspective. But at the same time, advertisers will need intimate knowledge of their local markets. You can’t have one without the other. When you manage both a global and local strategy at the same time, you’re thinking “glocal”.

READ: Auto brands are beating social apps at connecting with consumers

Marketers need to draw on expertise from partners who can bring the experience of running global campaigns alongside the ability to understand local markets. In practice, this means delivering dynamic creatives from around the world, shaped to fit each city according to its particular culture and identity.

Conclusion

You don’t have to be an expert at football to get the marketing right during the World Cup. But you do need to keep your eye on the ball when it comes to your target audience’s movements, and the creatives you’re planning to wow them with. With the help of compelling creatives served to the right individuals in the right context, marketers will be able to reap the rewards of one of this year’s most exciting international sporting event.

At 5 pm on the Fourth of July, forty-odd members of Team Adidas were watching the kick-off of the Colombia vs. Brazil quarterfinal match on three flat screens from Adidas’ real-time marketing hub in Rio de Janeiro. A fourth screen tracked the most searched players among the 100 or so World Cup athletes Adidas sponsors; it showed Colombian star James Rodriguez rise to the top of the list.

The war room is located at the Rio headquarters of Flamengo Athletic Club, one of the world’s most popular soccer teams. During the World Cup, the headquarters is home to Posto Adidas, a three-story retail space, media center, tech hub and rooftop VIP space – a gut renovation of an area that previously housed over 4,000 Flamengo trophies collecting dust.

The war room from the outside. Credit: Julie Ruvolo

It was the biggest day thus far at the month-long World Cup, and of Adidas’ months-long preparation to do real-time marketing on a sustained global scale. The winners of the days’ two matches – Germany against France, followed by Brazil against Colombia – would play each other in the semi-finals on Tuesday, July 8. Adidas is one of the tournament’s major sponsors, and it has spent the last year crafting an ambitious campaign to build the players and national soccer federations it sponsors – representing nine of the 32 national teams that made it to the World Cup – into heroes that are “all in or nothing”. By this point in the tournament, the Adidas campaign slogan seems as appropriate for the marketers as it is for the surviving teams.

“We want to be the most talked about brand at World Cup,” says Tom Ramsden, brand marketing director for Adidas Football, who oversees communications across advertising, PR, social and retail. “We knew we were going to do something real-time, that isn’t completely brand new to us. But it is at this scale.”

“The spin-off would be to be the most talked about in terms of how much traffic you can drive to retail, use of things like the hashtag and everything else,” Ramsden adds. “But that simple goal is what is keeping the train on the tracks.”

Long road to Rio

The preparation is over. Now it‘s time to deliver. @jamesdrodriguez: #allin or nothing. #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/GJvaZTzs8u

— adidasfootball (@adidasfootball) July 4, 2014

While real-time marketing has often meant a social media push around a relatively limited event like the Super Bowl, July 4 marked the 23rd consecutive day of Adidas’ effort to produce and push out exclusive content across social and global retail channels in sync with events during the 64 World Cup matches. For the last year, London-based social media agency We Are Social has been flying across the globe to gather content on over 100 Adidas players that can be assembled on the fly – regardless of who wins. Luckily for Adidas, one of those athletes is James Rodriguez, a 22 year-old who had scored six goals by this point and was the emerging star for Colombia, an Adidas-sponsored team that hadn’t gotten this far before in a World Cup.

We Are Social pared the massive footage it gathered down into a “content bible” of 1,000 images and 160 videos primed for use in reaction to game play – clips like Rodriguez shooting a penalty kick to Colombian player Pablo Amero demonstrating his victory dance. By December, it had an hour-by-hour calendar of the full 32-day tournament, anticipating what might happen, and developing content around it.

“It’s basically spread betting,” Ramsden says.

Official Bazucas on display from the VIP rooftop overlooking Rio. Credit: Julie Ruvolo

Thus far, Adidas seems to be achieving what it set out to. It is the most talked about brand on Twitter during the World Cup, with over 1.6 million tweets, retweets and replies mentioning the brand, according to Rob Hughes, Adidas’ senior global football PR manager. And #allin is the most used brand hashtag on Twitter, with 570,000 mentions since the Cup began June 12.

The company’s YouTube audience has also doubled, with more than 200,000 new subscribers since play started. On Facebook, Adidas has added over one million fans, and a community built for Argentine star and Adidas player Lionel Messi has grown by 500,000 more.

“It’s the first time we’ve seen an advertiser be reactive during a sporting event on YouTube,” says Rob Pilgrim, industry manager at Google London. “There is a half-life on content, and it’s important to get it out. Adidas has been posting four or five videos a day and has been growing subscribers at a faster rate than all the other World Cup sponsors.”

In the war room, a technologically tricked-out classroom enclosed by glass displays of Adidas footwear, was mostly quiet except for computer keystrokes and clicks and a Brazilian announcer doing the play-by-play on ESPN Brazil Live. Laptops, wires and power cords criss-cross shared wooden tables where Adidas’ global football team, representing communications, social media, PR, production and ten global soccer markets from Brazil to China are sandwiched between execs from Twitter, YouTube parent Google, Adidas’ real-time media buying agency Carat and We Are Social, which is producing real-time content from the back row.

“Flexibility has been the key here,” says Rob Seidu, Carat’s London-based managing director for Adidas. “We’re creating a system and a framework versus the traditional media planning.”

First match

Fußball ist wie Schach… Danke @matshummels. #allin or nothing #worldcup #frager pic.twitter.com/G2as2VzqJ2 — adidasfussball (@adidasfussball) July 4, 2014

At the day’s kick-off meeting at 10:18 am, Bindi Shah, senior account manager at Twitter, ran through the social media stats. The number of Adidas tweets had been increasing, averaging 12.2 million per day in the week prior and peaking when Brazil went into penalty kicks against Chile on June 28.

At 1 pm, the France vs. Germany match kicked off, and by 1:14 pm, Adidas player Mats Hummels had scored the first goal, for Germany. We Are Social prepped an image of Hummels, and it was live within a minute at @adidasfootball and @adidasfussball.

“After the game we’ll have the image on outdoor projections in Munich, Berlin and Hamberg,” says Marc Oltmann, Adidas’ senior communications manager, Area Central (Germany). “Public viewing is huge in Germany,” he adds.  By the next morning, it would be on digital out-of-home sites on the subway and on flat screens in German stores.

With five minutes to go in the match, Adidas’ Hughes told the team that three pieces of content were ready to go if Germany wins: a Hummels photo, a Vine video of his goal and a group shot in case another German player also scores.

After Germany completes its win, fresh Getty Images photos of Hummels and team members celebrating were tweeted from @adidasfootball, the brand’s global handle, as well as Germany’s @adidasfussball, with copy in German that translates to “checkmate”.

Within seven minutes, the tweet racked up over 1,000 retweets; Oltmann declares it the German team’s most successful tweet ever. It continued to climb.

“It’s about telling the right stories at the right time,” says Joe Weston, a We Are Social account director. “We can take something that’s much bigger than social and activate it from German undergrounds to retail stores across the world. Being able to dictate retail space from the content created in this room is massive. And none of the content we push out repeats, on that channel or on others, except for special hero moments.”

Adidas has sponsored the official World Cup ball since 1970, this time around crowdsourcing a name for it – Brazuca. “A million people voted and Brazuca came out on top,” says Gareth Leeding, We Are Social’s art director.

The Brazuca, which has over 3 million followers at @Brazuca – 2.3 million of them added since June 12 – has already been around the world, appearing in photo ops with an endless stream of soccer players as well as the likes of Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams, Justin Bieber and Samuel L. Jackson.

“It’s important to make sure it wasn’t just a football audience,” says Leeding. “#Allin is very serious, but Brazuca is more fun.”

Clear moments

By 5 pm, the war room had received the fifth meal of the day from an endlessly rotating buffet. Brazil captain Thiago Silva scored in the first seven minutes, followed by teammate David Luiz at the 69-minute mark. Colombia’s Rodriguez scored on a penalty kick with just ten minutes left to play.

“It’s now or never,” says Ramsden, clearly rooting for a win for Colombia and Team Adidas’ Rodriguez. He scrolled through Twitter results for “now or never” and discussed story options, including the emergence of Rodriguez as the World Cup star and a message to the Colombian team about holding their heads high. Team Adidas posted an image of Rodriguez within another minute: “Tomorrow never dies. @jamesdrodriguez #allin or nothing,” referencing a James Bond film because sports lore has it that he was named after 007.

By 6:55 pm, Brazil had lost its star player, Neymar, to a serious back injury but wins and advances to the semifinals. Adidas tweeted a photo with Rodriguez’ back to the camera and eyes on the goal box: “Hold your head high. @jamesdrodriguez went #allin for his country, and now he has the world at his feet. #WorldCup”.

Hold your head high. @jamesdrodriguez went #allin for his country, and now he has the world at his feet. #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/eJ5WcrYwQn — adidasfootball (@adidasfootball) July 4, 2014

“For World Cup it’s about clear moments,” says Ramsden. “Anticipated planning has been one of the keys to our success. We’re ready for moments, and we’re ready for lots of moments.”

He’s already looking ahead to the near future when the action is even faster and match balls and players are all micro-chipped to provide a new level of real-time stats.

“Think about the access and footprint Adidas has in football,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. Four weeks ago, James Rodriguez didn’t have universal appeal like a player like Messi, but now he does. The challenge is, how do we go from what is already a reasonably sized operation to something which is mass storytelling that is ten times the size of this right now?”

In the Lebanese shy sports marketing environment, some local brands are still making it

After the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the recent UEFA Champions League, the next and biggest sports – and ad – event of the year, is the 2014 FIFA World Cup. “Leading Lebanese and global brands know that, every four years between June and July, their consumers will be glued to their TV sets or dragged by their friends to watch the games elsewhere. In fact, the World Cup is the only sporting event on the planet with close to 260 million viewers just for the final game,” says communication manager at Leo Burnett, Samer Makarem. While some only recently jumped on the sports marketing bandwagon for the upcoming World Cup, many brands and agencies have spent years growing the discipline around the world and in the region.

Kick off.

As per regional brand leader and acting general manager at TBWARAAD, Charbel Khoury, globalization gave birth to sports marketing. He says, in the past two decades, globalization has become a de facto trend that created new consumer behaviors. To cope with this change, a lot of prominent brands have set sail toward becoming global, which required a paradigm shift in brand strategies. This important milestone begged the question of how to ensure global reach, taking into account language and cultural barriers. “Marketers and communication gurus soon came to realize that sports and music are the two avenues that can cross those cultural barriers. Thus, a new discipline, called ‘marketing through sports’ saw the light in the ’80s and, thanks to the expansion of sports in the past three decades, this avenue gained ground swiftly and exponentially,” says Khoury.

“Overall, brands that stay ahead in the marketplace are those that are able to be relevant and present in the lives of their consumers or potential consumers without setting sales as their first objective – and sports marketing helps to achieve this,” says Makarem. The fact is that major sports events are tempting for brands, given that their viewership and consumer involvement are extremely high. “When brands want to make sure their pieces of communication are seen, all of a sudden they can find all types of consumers coming together for this sports event,” says Makarem. “There was a time when a certain brand used to sponsor sports events for the sake of being associated with the right caliber. For example, watch brand Rolex has always been a famous sponsor of both golf and tennis tournaments, while Bank BNP Paribas sponsors tennis tournament, Roland Garros. However, the trend has shifted and today’s modern consumer is both interested and proud to lead a healthy, fit lifestyle; this creates new opportunities for brands to stay in touch with consumers and further speak their language through sports partnerships. While doing so, a brand also potentially links its values to the positive ones of sports and health,” says strategic planning director at Impact BBDO, Roy Nammour. Makarem agrees, stressing on the fact that many human stories, such as self-evolution, pain, perseverance, challenges in the face of adversity, are related to sports and help brands to convey the overall message.

“There is always a sports marketing solution for any brand, whether it is a capital good or an FMCG, a gold watch or a can of juice. The sports product should reflect the brand identity and character, match the audience group and go in line with the media character of the vehicle that is broadcasting the sports event,” says regional director of Memac Ogilvy sports management, Karim Younes. Sports marketing strategies can range from sports integration to direct sponsorships and star endorsements. According to Younes, successful sports integration strategies include MasterCard’s Player Mascots Program, which awarded 22 children the chance to accompany a player onto the pitch at the beginning of a Champions League match, and Ford’s Drive to Wembly competition, when the automotive brand gave away 364 tickets to the UEFA finals and created a series of short, football-inspired ads featuring the newly launched vehicle Kuga, along with the UEFA anthem.

Among global successful sponsorship tie-ups, Younes mentions watch brand Hublot and the Scuderia Ferrari F1 team, energy drink Red Bull and the Formula One (its presence at the first F1 race victory in 2011 made the drinks company the best exposed brand at the Australian  Grand Prix, with coverage exceeding $14.1 million), Evian and the Wimbeldon ATP (the brand managed to gain the highest ever top-of-mind awareness, online shopping visitation and dramatic growth in sales during the summer season, reaching 24 percent) and fashion luxury brand Giorgio Armani and Cristiano Ronaldo (the latest big sponsorship).

Talking about star endorsements, Younes says, when the brand’s objective is to ensure association, recognition and, ultimately, increase sales, athlete endorsements and club partnerships are vital, especially since consumers purchase endorsed products based on a bundle of perceived benefits. “However, tie-ups with national teams and federations, events and clubs tend to enjoy a lesser risk than athlete endorsements. Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong are clear examples of the risk that marketers might undertake if they solely sponsor athletes that turn out to behave badly and consequently fall out of favor with their adoring public. NBA superstar Kobe Bryant’s McDonald’s and Sprite promotions dried up after he was accused of sexual assault in 2004. The case was ultimately dropped, but the companies refused to comment on the reasons for holding Bryant’s endorsement deals. Injury is another risk; Ronaldo could have missed the 2014 World Cup, possibly jeopardizing his $21 million endorsement deals,” says Younes.

“It is worth noticing as well that the improvement and growth in broadcasting and technology, coupled with social networking, play a crucial role in creating opportunities by allowing fans to get closer to athletes and sports personalities. This provides sponsors with an opportunity for two-way communications and engagement and allows for high-quality coverage of sports events as well, playing a greater role in increasing the popularity of the sports industry,” he adds.

Don’t force it.

For general manager of Intermarkets, Sara Assaf, it is better not to go for sports marketing, rather than force some sponsorships or partnerships. “To ensure the success of a sports marketing approach, the link between the brand and the sport should make sense and be relevant, because when a connection between a certain brand and a sport event is forced, the communication will fail,” she explains. As an example, Assaf mentions the World Cup, which targets a wider audience, resulting in sponsorships coming from brands that target the mass. Hence, we won’t see any luxury brand sponsoring such sports event. “It is all about maximizing the return and optimizing the investment at the end of the day,” says Assaf. “By sponsoring an event attended by one million people, the brand is investing a sum targeting one million people; if the brand’s core target is just 100,000 people, the ROI won’t be achieved,” she explains and mentions one of Intermarkets’ accounts, Lebanese beer Almaza, for which it will be relevant and efficient to use the World Cup indirectly in its upcoming advertising campaigns, since whenever we say football, we think of beer. “Almaza will never be related to a tennis or golf event, for its world doesn’t match the world of these sports,” adds Assaf. Speaking about ROIs, Elie Geahchan, FP7’s director in charge of brands such as McDonald’s, Ford Motors, Bank Byblos, among others, says, in Lebanon, brands still prefer, most of the time, to go with the traditional 30-second TVCs, instead of investing in a sports event that won’t ensure the needed ROIs.

Unequipped ground.

“In Lebanon, politics is involved even in sports, which makes local sports events risky for advertisers; local brands get scared to associate themselves with a sports club and be perceived as [politically] biased,” says Geahchan. “In the early ’00s, every local brand was in on the hype around Lebanese basketball, because of the huge buzz around the league from fans,” says Leo Burnett’s Makarem, who remembers a Libby’s Juice commercial when its nationwide equity shot up, because it featured two basketball superstars in its communication and this was aspirational to the Lebanese youth. “Unfortunately, the decline of our local sports leagues in recent years has given advertisers a limited spectrum when it comes to local sports. We have a lot of fans, but not much hype built around local sports events. Hence, rare are brands that use sports partnerships in their communications,” says Makarem.

Ogilvy’s Younes agrees on the problems of the Lebanese sports scene, but is a bit more optimistic. “On a local level, Lebanon has been significantly affected by the economic downturn and political instabilities, which have consequently backfired on sports and, consequently, sponsors. The lack of spectatorship in football stadiums and the basketball federation’s chaotic and politically lead elections have put both local football and basketball in jeopardy. However, basketball is back now and the FIBA has lifted its sanction on the LBF; football is slowly recovering and motorsports and volleyball are on the right track for local popularity. This revival is driven by the live TV coverage of those events, which ensures further popularity (for example, Al Jadeed TV and the Local Football League, LBC endorsing basketball, MTV set to promote volleyball and OTV and Rallye of Lebanon). As a result, sponsors are expected to start approaching those products driven by the wide reach of those media vehicles that exclusively and aggressively promote them,” says Younes. “Today, sporting events are a multifaceted and multimedia industry, with a growing appeal to an ever-increasing number of Lebanese fanatics. This is driven by Lebanon’s young dynamic population; emotional, very loyal to their clubs and stars and consistently craving for sports content. The clients, unfortunately, aren’t able to realize the opportunity yet,” he adds.

Despite the negative facet of the Lebanese sports industry, a number of successful activities and partnerships are, in fact, happening. Mostly, FMCGs, electronics, telecom operators, banks and automotive vehicles “consume” local sports events in their communications. In 2007, Bank Audi had Maxime Chaya as its corporate ambassador; in 2012, Alfa Telecom sponsored the Lebanese Football League and Leo Burnett developed a piece of communication on the unity of the Lebanese people when it comes to cheering for their national pride, as the brand’s purpose is “bringing people together”; from 2009 till 2013, Blom Bank was sponsoring the Beirut Marathon, a major local sports event that has been attracting advertisers for the past few years. Recently, Ford Motors was the official sponsor of the 2014 Rallye of Lebanon and the Sagesse basketball team, while the Central Bank of Lebanon officially sponsored the 2014 Beirut Marathon, among others. Impact BBDO’s Nammour mentions Al-Mawarid Bank’s #FITLEB program – a national motivational platform that started out with the sponsorship of the Beirut Marathon 10K women’s race and developed into one of the bank’s main activities: organizing fitness sessions with professional trainers on the streets of Beirut, launching a competition on social media inciting people to work out, participate and win prizes, introducing banking products and solutions and propagating the movement through traditional media. “What seemed to be a challenge at first quickly turned out to be a positive opportunity: people quickly grasped the idea of AMB being a fit bank and started to join the movement and this positively elevated the brand’s equity,” he says.

However, Ogilvy’s Younes says brands with international sponsorship tie-ups such as Coca-Cola, Hyundai, Sony, Visa, Castrol, Budweiser, Adidas, McDonalds, J&J – the last three being the official sponsors of the 2014 World Cup – enjoy greater advantage over other local Lebanese brands and can benefit further by locally activating those tie-ups. “The only pitfall is the lack of a data and research currency, as well as pricing accuracies that assess a sponsorship’s ROI,” he says. Speaking of the importance of the World Cup for Lebanese brands, Younes says: “In Lebanon, marketers integrate the World Cup within their communication plans to secure a bond between the brand, the fanatic and the sports product – the FIFA World Cup, in this case. Sponsors want to be embedded within the 2014 World Cup, provide consumers with a dream experience in Brazil, associate with players; they even capitalize on the 2014 World Cup as a tool to enhance brand recall and awareness.”  Not only established brands create hype for using this global event in their advertising campaigns, but emerging ones see it as a convenient opportunity for them to grow. One of these is the new Belgium watch brand Twelve, its name and designs are built around football; “twelve” being the number of players in a football team and its designs inspired from the 32 national football teams participating in the 2014 World Cup. “The passion for sports is similar to the passion for watches. This is why each watch brand is associated with a certain sport – Rolex with golf, Breitling with aviation, Tag Heuer with racing and Twelve with football,” says Philippe Khoury, managing partner at JP 10, the official distributor of Twelve in Lebanon.

Unlike other Arab markets, the Lebanese market should consider building more on international opportunities for “home” investments, since the local sports industry isn’t at its peak. “Football leagues in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have all been recognized as top ten leagues by the region’s highest football body, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). Sadly, Lebanon is still falling far behind with a very shy room for any kind of improvement,” concludes Younes.