World Cup’s US ad sales reach records in an unusual year

Football is normally the place to be for advertisers this time of year. Later this month, though, soccer is stealing the spotlight.

The FIFA World Cup Qatar kicks off on Nov. 20, marking the first time the game has been played in the autumn months, a decision made due to the scorching heat in the host country when the tournament has historically been held in June and July. The schedule shift means media buyers have more sports ad inventory than they usually do, but it also means advertisers have figured out how to best divvy up their ad spend so they can play both football and fútbol.

“This is the first time it now takes place in the busiest part of the year,” Michael Roca, managing director, DE&I investment, Omnicom Media Group, told Marketing Brew earlier this year. “We’re just trying to find new money [to spend].”

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The World Cup is big business. US broadcasters Fox Sports and NBCUniversal Telemundo paid more than $1 billion total for the rights to broadcast the World Cup in 2018 and 2022; Telemundo reportedly earned nearly $300 million in ad sales from the tournament in 2018 alone.

This year’s 64 games have attracted lots of advertiser attention in the US. Earlier this month, NBCUniversal Telemundo, which has the rights to the Spanish-language broadcast in the US, said it had surpassed revenue figures from 2018 and had cleared 2022 revenue goals for the broadcast,according to Mark Marshall, NBCUniversal president of advertising sales and partnerships. Two weeks out from the first game, there were only a “handful” of ad units remaining for the broadcast, Marshall said.

The interest has come from an array of categories, including growth in spending from auto, retail, QSR, and restaurant brands, Marshall said. Some advertisers include Volkswagen, Samsung, and Xfinity, as well as Ford, T-Mobile, and Coca-Cola, which will present the pregame, halftime, and postgame shows, respectively.

There are a few factors driving demand. First is the fact that Hispanic viewers are increasingly attractive to some advertisers due to their age and buying power—a dynamic that has helped supercharge Spanish-language TV more broadly.

“It’s no surprise that we’re pacing well ahead of where we were from a national as well as local ad sales perspective compared to the last World Cup in 2018,” Marshall said, pointing to US Hispanic and Latino population growth and GDP.

But there are other factors, too. The fourth-quarter timing of the game means holiday advertisers have identified the game as prime real estate. “We know that’s the space where we’re going to be able to reach this audience during the holiday rush of November, December,” Roca said.

Add to it that the US men’s national team qualified for the tournament earlier this year after failing to do so four years ago, prompting a flurry of planning activity among the advertising set.

“Advertisers were hesitant to jump into the World Cup and spent a lot of money there until we knew if Team USA was going to qualify,” Jimmy Spano, SVP, group director, Carat USA, recently told Marketing Brew. “Once Team USA qualified, you saw an influx of dollars.”

Timing is everything

That all sounds like good news, but the unusual timing of the match has caused some advertisers to face some hard calls about where to allocate their advertising dollars.

“If you have to decide between the World Cup or the NFL, or the World Cup or NCAA [football], it’s a tough decision,” Spano said. (Decisions about where to go, he said, vary from advertiser to advertiser.)

More importantly, the looming presence of the World Cup in Q4 has pushed other networks to sell their sports inventory sooner, so that they don’t lose out on last-minute spending, Spano said. Networks looked “early on in the year to try to cut deals for NFL or NCAA or whatever it might be to try to lock those dollars in and not be in jeopardy of losing those dollars because of something like the World Cup,” he told us.

But it’s anyone’s guess as to how viewership for fall sports in general will stack up with the World Cup airing in between college and professional football match-ups.

“I’m really interested in how it’s going to perform, because it’s the first time that it’s ever been done in Q4, and it goes up against the NFL,” Roca told us.