While the football played at the 2010 FIFA World Cup may not linger long in the memory, other aspects of Africa’s first football world championship certainly will.
South Africa didn’t simply host the tournament; it left an unforgettable African stamp on it. This was a tournament in which the host nation - not its Bafana Bafana team but the country itself - took centre-stage. It was a tournament whose signature sound was the monotone drone of the vuvuzela and which was characterised by a spirit of friendly co-operation, leading most of the hovering international media to wonder what all the pre-event wailing and gnashing of teeth had been about.
In short, South Africa had done it. In the face of significant doubt, and predictions of all manner of chaos, it had pulled it off. South Africa had justified FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s faith and taken its place in Word Cup legend. And according to Eelco van der Noll, global director, sports & entertainment at FIFA partners AB InBev, South Africa still hasn’t received all the plaudits it deserves: “I was in the country for six weeks and South Africa simply exceeded all expectations.
“They are not getting nearly enough credit for what was achieved by a country that is still a young democracy. The world may take a World Cup for granted but South Africa as a nation absolutely delivered. It was as smooth an operation as it could possibly have been.”
That’s praise indeed from a man who has seen the Word Cup and many other events from both sides of the sponsorship fence. Van der Noll has worked for major brands including MasterCard and Canon and for FIFA itself, giving him a fascinating perspective on the nature of the relationship between properties and their partners.
South Africa 2010 was Van der Noll’s first World Cup at the helm of AB InBev’s sponsorship operation, and it is one which highlights the complexity and sophistication of modern day partnerships in sport and the ways in which rights owners are recognising the realities of 21st century business needs by being more flexible in the way that their rights are utilised by brands. All of which requires a little background.
AB InBev was created by the $52 billion takeover of leading US brewer Anheuser Busch by InBev, the world-leading Belgium-based brewer. The company’s portfolio now includes Stella Artois, Becks and Budweiser. The acquisition became a major issue in the United States where Anheuser Busch is something of an institution. But today the company is not only the world’s biggest beer company (with revenues of $9.2 billion and a profit of $1.15 billion in the second quarter 2010) but one of the five biggest consumer goods corporations on the planet.
Merging these two mega-corporations was never going to be a straightforward exercise and one of the areas that needed attention was the legacy of sponsorship deals on the AB books. Over the years Anheuser Busch has become one of the world’s biggest spending sponsors as it promoted its Budweiser and Bud Light brands heavily in the United States and worldwide. The brand was everywhere, from NASCAR to the NFL and, of course, the FIFA World Cup.
“The issue we faced was transferring the rights, which AB held through to 2014, to the new corporation and to make sure that they could be used in a way which offered AB InBev the best possible value,” explains Van der Noll. In essence that meant enabling AB InBev to harness the power of the World Cup to meet specific needs in individual markets around the world - something which had never done before. And naturally, FIFA “took some convincing” to take what some felt was a fairly radical step. Van der Noll was ideally placed to do the convincing.
His four years at FIFA as head of marketing and a member of the federation’s management team gave him a unique insight into the way the organisation works which, he says, gave him “a better understanding and respect for FIFA and the reasons they sometimes push back against brands. Our strategy was to maximise the footprint of our sponsorship.
Overwhelmingly that meant promoting the Budweiser brand but there are certain markets around the world where we wanted to activate on other AB InBev brands. These included Brahma in Brazil (the brand already sponsors the Brazilian national teams), Jupiler in Holland and Harbin in China.
“We are not like Coca-Cola which has one brand across all territories. The creation of AB InBev opened the floodgates to a number of brands and this became the cornerstone of our strategy. To make the sponsorship worthwhile we simply had to involve multiple brands and, naturally, FIFA was initially very protective because it was concerned about the possibility of clutter around the beer category,” Van der Noll said.
With the agreement of FIFA in place, AB InBev developed a two-phase approach. In-country activations for key individual brands made full use of the World Cup assets while Budweiser, which was promoted across some 80 territories worldwide, was supported by a global digital overlay built around the concept of Budweiser United, a social network-based programme drawing the world together around its love of football, reality shows and, of course, beer.
For the full interview see the latest edition of SportBusiness International published September 1.
