Many major brands want to be associated with the drama and excitement of the forthcoming World Cup in Rio. Yet only a handful of elite brands will get to enjoy a close association with the tournament; six official partners, a second tier of just eight official sponsors and a final tier of eight national partners in Brazil. The benefits for the organisations involved are obvious. FIFA can command huge fees by limiting the number of brands at the tournament; the brands get exclusivity in their own product category; and the audience gets to enjoy each match without dozens of ads competing for their attention.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) takes the same approach with its events. Only a few brands win the right to be at the event, and there are no trackside ads. Instead, brands are integrated into the event experience – with exclusive Omega timers, onsite McDonalds restaurants and Visa branded cash points.
Even the All England Club, an organisation which isn't immediately associated with innovation in advertising, has managed to strike an effective balance between sponsorship and user experience. Spectators at Wimbledon this summer won't be bombarded with ad messages. Yet, on centre court, when they look over at the score they'll see the golden Rolex logo integrated seamlessly into the scoreboard.
The organisers of the world's biggest sporting events are extracting maximum value from brands targeting their audience without ruining the user experience, and digital publishers must learn to do the same.
Yet, in an effort to overcome falling ad revenue, some of the most influential online publishers are still presenting their loyal, interested visitors with highly interruptive, intrusive and annoying ad formats. One reason for the growth of interruptive ads is that conventional, standard digital ad formats are very ineffective at driving conversions and, when combined with a vast quantity of available inventory, their value has fallen significantly as a result, hitting publishers' bottom lines.
Eye-tracking studies by Jakob Nielsen have long shown that consumers have developed banner blindness and simply don't look in the margins of web pages where standard ads are usually located. One study grimly noted that consumers are 475 times more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad.
Over time, increasingly intrusive online ad formats have been developed and deployed to counter banner blindness. The volume of these ads on publishers' sites has exploded in the scramble for revenue. Yet when consumers are focusing on the content they visited a site to consume, they don't want that experience to be contaminated by bad ads. It's no coincidence that Adblock Plus has been downloaded 200 million times.
Many digital publishers' woes have been further compounded by the audience migration to mobile, where the space available for ads is restricted, and consumers' tolerance for interruptive formats is even lower than on other devices.
What digital publishers need to recognise is that, rather than impose advertising on consumers, ads can be seamlessly and natively woven into the publisher's site in much the same way as the Adidas logo is a part of a World Cup match ball. Applying real-world sports sponsorship strategies to the online world means deploying ads that fit within the digital environment that online publishers have created.
Many premium publishers have developed a strong brand for their digital publications, both in terms of the aesthetics of each page of editorial, and the type of content they publish. Consumers come to trust the publisher's brand and develop an affinity with it. In essence they become "fans". The more carefully publishers develop their fans' relationship with their publication, the greater the value of their inventory to advertisers. Yet, if digital publishers continue to overwhelm their sites with too many or too intrusive ads, the ability of consumers to build an affinity with the publication is compromised. The organisers of the World Cup, the Olympics, and Wimbledon know that one way to alienate a fan base is to bombard them with irrelevant or intrusive advertising.
Publishers need to learn from this, and implement monetisation strategies which work with the brand values that attracted consumers into becoming fans in the first place.
Digital publishers must look and learn from how the world's greatest sporting events turn attention into revenue without ruining the spectacle audiences came to enjoy.
Guy Cookson is co-founder and chief marketing officer at Respond
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