“We have not gone into this with our eyes shut. We have a very strong relationship with FIFA and have been in constant dialogue with them before and after ISL collapsed,” said communications director Neil Pattie.
FIFA’s hastily formed in-house marketing body responded to last month’s collapse of ISL/ISMM by clinching a hat-trick of sponsorship deals today with Avaya and Japanese companies, Toshiba and NTT.
As part of its deal with FIFA, Avaya, which is already affiliated with US baseball, the National Football League and golf course owners Pebble Beech, will provide convereged telephony and data networks, unified messaging, conferencing and video conferencing for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups and the 2003 Women’s World Cup for an undisclosed sum. Contrary to earlier reports in the press, Avaya will not be building the official web sites for the events. In return, Avaya will be given two on-field billboards at each World Cup match and on-screen logo placements.
Yvonne Curl, Avaya’s head of marketing at Avaya said: “Avaya is likely to become a globally recognised company after 2002. Hopefully by 2006, brand awareness for Avaya would have increased ten-fold or even 20-fold.”
This is the biggest sponsorship deal Avaya has been involved in, but the company did not exist until seven months ago when it was spun off from phone equipment company Lucent Technologies.
Since it de-merged from Lucent, Avaya has managed to weather the tech storm across the Atlantic. “We are not immune to the economic slowdown but our company has performed better than expected,” said Yvonne Curl.
Indeed, for the second quarter ending March 31, Avaya, which has a market capitalisation of about $4.65bn, reported a pre-tax loss which was better than analysts had forecast and a revenue increase of 1.1 per cent to $1.852. Last month, a broker at CIBC World Markets told investors to “buy” the stock which is now worth $0.165 on the New York Stock Exchange – about 20 per cent less than its value on flotation.
