Published June 10
It is a familiar sight in sports-loving households: the TV on all day while friends and family congregate in the living room, whether it’s during NFL Sundays in the U.S. or for the lunchtime-to-midnight drama of the European Football Championships.
This ritual will kick off again this week as the FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico with the first of 104 matches over June and July. And it’s that communal viewing that makes the World Cup the most desirable advertising opportunity in the world, reckons João Ramires, vice president of ad sales for Spain and Portugal at DAZN.
So much so that audience targeting, the sine qua non of modern advertising, momentarily takes a back seat.
“It’s a very unorthodox thing to say, but targeting is not that important because we are basically reaching the entirety of the Spanish population,” Ramires said.
“If you are targeting a specific behavioral or customer signal, you’re not impacting only that specific target, but you are also impacting the full family. You need to take into consideration that this is consumption of content that is done with family, friends,” Ramires added.
DAZN will broadcast up to 16 hours of original live content on peak days, from matches to commentary. “It’s kind of nostalgic because I remember when I used to watch it with my family, you left the television on all day and it’s one match after the other,” Ramires said.
The scale is significant: Ramires said that DAZN and its partners reached 24 million unique viewers in Spain during last year’s Club World Cup — nearly half the country’s population of just under of 50 million. Ramires expects to surpass that figure this summer.
Recent surveys showed that more than 70% of people in Spain, France, Germany and the U.K. plan to watch the tournament. And in case you thought football is passé: Among Gen Zers, it’s more than 80%.
With such a massive audience, Ramires said he has only one goal in mind for his advertisers.
“My goal is that if [audiences] see a neo bank or if they see a quick-service restaurant, when they decide to purchase a product or service, that brand is top of mind, that’s my only goal,” Ramires said. “Brands can then use other tools at their disposal, performance tools, consideration tools, to bring them down the funnel.”
At its core, then, this is big brand advertising for big brand budgets. But that doesn’t mean it’s without guardrails.
DAZN is “partnering with several tech providers to provide customer signals, exclusions and so on,” Ramires said. DAZN will also be measured and audited by Fifty5Blue on both linear and streaming.
“Having this third-party, external measurement capability also gives [advertisers] full visibility that we are going to be invoicing via the third party and not what we report,” Ramires said.
But for all the reach the World Cup can offer, DAZN took a deliberately conservative approach when pitching packages to ad buyers. That’s because international tournaments are notoriously unpredictable.
“We considered a conservative placement for the Spanish team. So, anything that advertisers get, besides this conservative placement, is added value,” Ramires said.
Not that he really should worry; recent surveys showed that in some European countries, like France, the majority of viewers would continue watching the tournament even if their national team was knocked out.
Ramires said 30 advertisers signed up to DAZN’s World Cup packages, a record for the company during time-limited tournaments, spanning industries from consumer electronics to luxury, retail and digital banking. “If any advertiser wants to reach coverage of viewers during June and July, they need to be with us.”
Beyond standard mid-game ad slots, DAZN will also introduce pause ads (the hottest new commodity in streaming advertising, apparently) and L-frames.
But the biggest focus will be programmatic ad buys via dynamic ad insertion. “The majority of CTV campaigns in Spain are bought programmatically. … Our goal is that our dynamic ad insertion becomes a very big part of the advertising chunk that we’re going to have in the World Cup,” Ramires said.
