The World Cup final is nearly here! Even without the US in it to cheer for (and CONCACAF falling early), the past month has turned out to be one of the best World Cups of recent memory. Constant late-match dramatics, the impact of VAR, and deep runs by underdogs have left a nice taste with new and old soccer fans alike.
For marketers, it’s been no run-of-the-mill tournament too. Every four years it feels as if the digital/social space has been flipped on its head since the last tournament. The way people consume and interact with the World Cup has shifted since we were all watching Germany win their fourth Jules Rimet trophy. While social platforms are as disruptive as ever, in particular, Instagram as a platform for storytelling, it extends beyond them.
One thing that has stood out to NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises’ EVP of Digital Media and Emerging Business, Peter Blacker, has been the steady percentage of live digital viewers streaming on their smartphone. Those viewers make up 48% – 51% of the total live digital viewers for each game with others using TV and desktop to round it out. This stood out to Blacker as he had assumed people would switch to connected TVs on the weekend, however, those numbers rang true no matter the day of the week.
This was not the case for their parent company NBCUniversal when broadcasting the Olympics, which is geared to the more general American. Additionally, Telemundo’s broadcast of Mexico v. Sweden peaked at 1 million concurrent live streams, which is only the second time that an NBC Sports broadcast has reached that high, second only to this past year’s Super Bowl.
According to Blacker, “This is forcing a dialogue around scale when we talk about the multicultural audience. Maybe folks in our industry didn’t understand or see it previously, but when you see this level of scale, you quickly realize that this is the marketplace, and this is where the audience is.”
Some other interesting data points from the 48 group stage matches were:
- Telemundo’s live streaming coverage had reached 10.7 million unique viewers
- Telemundo had 105.3 million total live streams with more than 1.6 billion total minutes watched.
- Telemundo’s digital coverage led to an additional 15% of viewers to its TV-only audience
Categories: Broadcast, FIFA, Hispanic Marketing, Streaming, World Cup