Get ready for this shocker. Not everyone is mad for the World Cup. In fact, our CCS research of more than 11,000 people says that 57% of UK consumers are not excited about the Greatest Show on Earth.

Say hello to the World Cup Widows. Or, in this case the New World Cup Widows.

In past World Cup’s the view has been that this group (as the name might suggest) is pretty much made up of women, and as they make up the majority (but not all) of this number, our convergent world means that simply marketing at women through classic women’s channels in traditional women’s ways just won’t cut it.

The best way to look at your New World Cup Widows in age of convergence is to split them into two groups:

1. Those that don't care
2. The significant minority that don’t care now but might come on board

The Negative Football Complex

The main problem is that there isn’t an opposite of the World Cup – people don’t have an opposite interest, and getting everyone who isn’t watching behind another big event/marketing campaign/idea is an extraordinarily difficult task.

Creating hyper specific communities and targeting them with Hyperlocalised communications

To combat this, marketers need to look at creating specific audience centres and using them to deliver appropriate answers.

For example you could analyse the consumer sectors within people who like to watch sport and those who don’t like football. Or, people who like to participate in sport but don’t like football and drill down into finding what they do like and target them that way. (These could all fall in to group 2).

One way to talk to these audiences is to think hyper-locally. If the World Cup is about global brands, there is a huge opportunity in going local.

There are hundreds of ways you could use negative football emotion to bring people together in a positive way, from community-based events, such as non-football street parties or football free parks for football free picnics to getting involved with community fitness drives or healthy living initiatives.

Retailers

Retailers, and by that measure, shopping centres could be very effective centres for driving these initiatives or simply targeting these newly created groups – this is obviously becoming easier and easier due to technology and real time audience data – with some clever thinking such as time targeting and clever use of channels, such as digital out-of-home, you could pull together a very effective campaign on very manageable budget.

Second screening

A lot of the above is based on the assumption that World Cup Widows leave the house to do something else when the footie is on. However, there is actually a large group of people (often mums in this case) who is long suffering football watchers who do not want to be excluded from what can be a family event, just because they are not interested in what is drawing the family’s attention.

In a convergent world these people turn to the second screen. So instead of doing anti-football communications, it’s actually about targeting those people who are involved but not particularly paying attention.

Social-based real time planning, such as the great work by adidas around the event, could be utilised with a slightly different slant.

For example, for a fashion conscious demographic promoting Tweets about what any WAG that should pop up on screen is wearing could be very effective.

Humour

For the second group (those that might come on board) humour is a great tool. By making fun of football while they are disinterested, and in their language, you can massage the interest of an audience that may be swayed.

Look at the PC World ads. They are doing something different by being able to effectively target people who do like football, who don’t like football and who could be swayed about football.

 

By Matthew Knight, Head of Innovation at Carat. 

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