Public relations and the ‘inclusive’ World Cup 
Public relations is all about targeting. Sometimes PR professionals chose online media for their campaigns, other times broadcast is a better channel to get a communications message across.
In a recent PR post about online media and the world cup, it was suggested that FIFA has missed a trick with social media for this year’s World Cup.
My take in this public relations conundrum is that while FIFA has ‘dropped the ball’ with online media, it might have decided to:
1. ignore social media on inclusivity grounds
2. avoid the complex task of running a pan-global social media campaign
Firstly let’s look at point 1. Why would FIFA ignore social platforms on inclusivity grounds? Social media is the most inclusive form of media ever created, right?
My answer is simple. While I can afford a smart phone, a laptop, broadband and other modern luxuries, fans in North Korea or even in parts of host nation South Africa probably can’t.
Would moving parts of the World Cup experience into social media be excluding large numbers of people, perhaps the majority of football fans, from enjoying the tournament on an equal level to the rest of us?
I think it is very easy to argue “yes”. Just look at this map as an example, and look how many missing countries there are with no social platforjms at all.
Fig. 1.1. Click on the image to make it large enough to read on screen
Some might say that a true pan-global campaign should be tailored per country, allowing for use of social sites in some countries and not so in others, but I am not sure that this would be the right thing to do in this instance.
Football is a unifying force, so why exclude people from the experience? We are already seeing poor South Africans being priced out of tickets to matches, and this exclusion doesn’t need to be made any more prominent.
TV is still the number one medium globally, so let’s not forget that. I have been to rural villages in Asia and Africa and found families with TVs. It might be that during the tournament an entire village is crowded around one TV, but at least most villages can access a TV. Therefore a broadcast campaign should be the favoured platform.
Now let’s consider point 2, i.e. that a pan-Global campaign is just too difficult for FIFA. It is a slightly depressing consideration, but probably quite likely.
This presentation below starts to illustrate how difficult FIFA’s task would be. The presentation looks at which online media is popular in different countries, but even this very comprehensive study has lots of gaps, where there is no data, or possibly internet usage, i.e. Africa, parts of South America etc. Again, making a social media campaign is difficult to say the least.
Even in the ‘developed’ world some social platforms are more important than others. In Holland, for example, Facebook is not the number one platform and Twitter is even less popular. The Differences between platforms in other countries is a huge barrier and a complex problem.
Difficulty is no excuse of course for not giving social media a go. To the contrary, but while there are still organisations in the UK, US and elsewhere who are still baulking at trying social media because of a lack of understanding, one can imagine that perhaps FIFA found the task just too challenging.
Internet advertising overtakes TV in the UK
The shift in power which now makes internet advertising a bigger revenue stream than from broadcast media has come quicker than I thought.
The report seems very credible. Although I am always sceptical of ‘data’ from Newspaper Society and the Internet Advertising Bureau, this report seems to be an accurate picture.
The fact that Britain is the first country to reach this tipping point is encouraging too. It is not that often one feels like the UK is blazing a trail.
Full story is below.
Internet overtakes television to become biggest advertising sector in the UK
Record £1.75bn online spend makes UK first major economy to spend more on web ads than TV, says IAB
- Mark Sweney
- The Guardian, Wednesday 30 September 2009 02.16 BST
The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year.
The milestone marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century. It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.
UK advertisers spent £1.75bn on internet advertising in the six months to the end of June, a 4.6% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m was spent online.
The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.
The IAB originally predicted that internet ad spend would overtake TV at the end of 2009; however, the crippling advertising recession accelerated this by six months. TV advertising fell about 17% year on year in the first half, to about £1.6bn, according to the report.
The IAB’s figures show that of the total of £1.75bn spent on internet advertising, £1.05bn, or 60%, was spent on search advertising on websites including Google, up 6.8% year on year.
Online classified advertising grew by 10.6% year on year to £385m, about 22% of total internet ad spend. But online display advertising, such as banners on websites, fell by 5.2% year on year, to £316.5m. This was an 18% share of all internet ad spend.
The ray of light within the online display ad sector was the nascent, but rapidly growing, online video advertising sector. The IAB estimated that this sector grew by close to 300% year on year, to almost £12m.
Thinkbox, the UK TV marketing body, has taken exception to the IAB’s figures, arguing that the internet is now mature and diverse and it is inaccurate to collate all the figures as if it is one single medium.
“It is interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it,” said Lindsey Clay, marketing director at Thinkbox. “Online marketing spend is made up of many things, including email, classified ads, display ads (including online TV advertising) and, overwhelmingly, search marketing. They should be judged individually.”
Guy Phillipson, the chief executive of the IAB, reckoned that there is still significant growth potential left in the internet ad market.
“We could absolutely see it grow to being a 30% medium [of share of ad spend], to go past £4bn to even £5bn annually,” he said. “Online display advertising has plenty of room for growth.”
Despite the seemingly inexorable rise of internet ad spend, a closer examination of the IAB’s figures show that the recession has had an impact. In the first quarter £920m was spent on online advertising, representing 8.6% year-on-year growth. However, in the second quarter, spend fell almost £100m to £832m, representing only a 1.1% increase on the amount spent in the same period last year.
Adam Smith, futures director at WPP’s combined media operation Group M, argued that the internet’s share of total UK ad spend could be close to its peak.
Smith cited factors such as the increasing share of time that users spend on social networking websites, which have not attracted huge advertising spend, and the increasing saturation of internet penetration in the UK as potential limiting factors. “This day was bound to arrive, as the internet has been attracting a huge long tail of advertisers that have not advertised before doing completely new things,” he said. “It is a memorable event. However, it is a bit simplistic to make this comparison [and] it is always possible that internet’s share [of total UK ad spend] could go backwards if TV has a good year.”
The UK is not the first country where internet ad spend has overtaken TV spend, Denmark reached the milestone about six months ago. But it is the first major economy to do so
Twitter is child’s play. Please play safely
I have been showing a newbie around Twitter today. The whole process of inducting someone to Twitter cracks me up every time. The look on his or her face as you explain how it works. The impression of incredulous horror the exude as I explain WHY I follow Andy Crane of all people (of Children’s BBC fame, and most recently Channel M)…
I think Twitter newbies fall into two categories:
1) those who are mesmerised and somewhat baffled by what on god’s earth Twitter is all about
2) people are hostile to Twitter and take the mick, making statements about Twitter users living in the “great blue beyond”.
I thought today’s newbie fell somewhere between the two…
This experience got me thinking about how best to explain Twitter to a lay person. I have a training presentation for Twitter, but this induction was a 5 minute flying tour in between meetings.
Condensing Twitter down into such a small time period was, to say the least, challenging. Twitter is so versatile it is difficult to give an “elevator” pitch which explains what it is, as the reality is that the service can be a different tool to each and every person.
Even handy guides like this example from Mashable http://mashable.com/2009/07/20/twitter-new-users/ , don’t really explain the benefits…
The PR and communications’ industry likes to think it knows a thing or two about Twitter. Everyone in this industry talks about having a strategy for Twitter use.
A strategy is, of course, hugely advisable as reputations can be destroyed within a second. On the other hand, is all this talk of “strategy” making something complicated out of an internet tool which is intrinsically simple?
The most rewarding way of getting to grips with Twitter is through the most basic of human activity: play. Play about. Have fun. Chat to people, but do it like you might at a social event. In other words, don’t be uncouth, rude, aggressive or unprofessional (unless that’s how you would normally behave). Don’t talk too much. Be like the wise old sage.
If you are the chief executive of a large corporate, your idea of play or socialising might involve catching up with the golf or cricket. Or discussing the Today programme. The likelihood is that at this level, you will have been media trained anyway so you will be well aware of the pitfalls of saying the wrong thing. You’ll soon get the hang of hashtags and @replies and all the other strange terminology…
The real risk, I feel, is for middle management and their staff. I expect to see more and more stories of employees blundering online. Spilling the beans about sensitive information to competitors, sharing data that was “for their eyes only.” I smell a disciplinary or two on the horizon. …
Please don’t interpret what I am saying as “don’t get involved in Twitter unless you are an old hand at handling the media”. Far from it. In fact those who are not used to dealing with the media should play, and discover like anybody else, but play with great care. Think long and hard before pressing enter and sending your Tweet. Once your Tweet is out there somewhere, then there is no getting it back. I don’t want to sound like the Daily Mail (what? I am doing? Oh.. Sorry) but look at these high profile examples of inappropriate comments as examples http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/twitter/5250680/Top-10-worst-tweets.html . These could be you! They could get you the sack!
In a nutshell, anyone who is not accustomed to dealing with the media, should think twice about using Twitter without undertaking a little bit background reading, training or seeking the advice of a user.
Before you start Tweeting, have a read of this guide from IBM (which @jonclements found for me) http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html . There are some good pieces of advice here for both Twitter users and employers / HR practitioners.
© James Crawford’s PR and Media Blog. 2009