Sponsors Join The Scrum To Reach Global Audience
With the Rugby World Cup now spanning eight weeks, it will be fascinating to see how sponsors will fill gaps in the action to maintain fans’ ties to their brands
The Rugby World Cup is in full flow across France. Apart from being a sporting festival, it is also one of the largest activation platforms for brands with an involvement in global sport.
The Rugby World Cup in Japan delivered an estimated $3.9bn economic impact and a spend on the ground by visitors of $1.1bn. The tournament under way in France is likely to exceed those numbers again.
Whatever about the sometimes intangible value of hosting a major tournament, the impact on the global sponsorship market is unquestionable.
There is one major change to the line-up of the brands that are supporting the tournament this year at a worldwide partner level — the replacement of Heineken by Japanese brand Asahi in the beer category.
Heineken had been a long-time partner of the tournament and is a major player in the world of sports sponsorship. However, the Dutch brewer’s rugby portfolio has slimmed down as resources are diverted to football and Formula 1.
While Heineken remains a principal partner of the European Champions Cup, it has given way to Investec as the naming rights partner. It will be interesting to see Guinness and Heineken go toe to toe in the on and off trade, each unable to use official RWC branding but still leveraging their deep attachment to the sport.
Mastercard is back again, having been a worldwide partner of the tournament since 2008, and will be activating throughout using ambassadors including Dan Carter and Bryan Habana. Another long-term partner is Land Rover, under its Defender brand, and so too Société Générale, which came on board for the RWC in France in 2007.
Consulting firm Capgemini is the digital transformation partner of world rugby, and the last of the six worldwide tournament sponsor partners is Emirates. The airline’s ‘Fly Better’ promise features on the officials’ kit.
Beneath this level, the sponsorship portfolio extends wide and deep, with three tiered categories of Official Sponsors, Official Suppliers, and Official Supporters. This is where the local organisers get most involved and derive a larger share of the revenue.
Orange, Vivendi, SNCF and Total Energies are four of the best known of the eight in the Official Sponsor category. There are more familiar rugbyassociated brands in the Official Supplier band with BKT, sponsors of the United Rugby Championship, Eden Park and Gilbert, both partners of the IRFU, Meta, HP and Canon involved. Sage and
Volvic are the most familiar of the eight brands that complete the sponsorship party for the tournament.
The Rugby World Cup operates a ‘clean shirt’ policy, so the Irish team will not be wearing their Vodafone-branded jerseys. However, Vodafone, Bank of Ireland, Guinness and other Irish Rugby sponsors will be reminding fans through TV and digital campaigns of their support for the boys in green.
Because of player welfare, this tournament will be running over an extended period of almost eight weeks, with all of the action focused on weekend games. It is hard to judge until we look back what kind of impact that has on brand campaigns and their effectiveness.
A FIFA World Cup taking place in half the time is a more immersive experience, and the RWC will be different, with greater downtime between higher peaks of engagement. It is fascinating to be calculating in real time how the sponsors fill those gaps to maintain the ties that bind fans to their brand.