World Cup Winners....

People in the U.S. can complain all they want about their issues with soccer, but from an advertisers perspective, it is the Holy Grail if you want to get in front of a world wide audience. There is an interesting article in today's International Herald Tribune entitled, "On Advertising: Cup winners and losers."

The article noted:

Old media: France's surprising run showed that "old" soccer players like Zinédine Zidane, 34, can still perform at a top level. At a time when many viewers are turning away from mainstream media, the World Cup demonstrates the continuing power of live sports events to pull in the mass audiences that advertisers crave.

Kevin Alavy, an analyst in London for the media buying agency Initiative, said that through the semifinals, television audiences in 49 of the largest markets rose an average of 15 percent from the last World Cup in 2002. One reason for the increase was a more favorable time zone for viewers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas: The 2002 Cup was played in South Korea and Japan.

Compared with the 1998 World Cup in France, which was played in the same time zone as this year's tournament, average audiences were down by 3 percent to 5 percent, Alavy said. Still, given that the last eight years have seen a proliferation in the number of TV channels available to many households in Europe, "the World Cup has done better than a lot of other programming in dealing with fragmentation," he said.

Old media's successes were not limited to television. According to La Tribune, a French business newspaper, the sports daily L'Équipe sold 900,000 copies the day after France's quarterfinal victory over Brazil, nearly three times its daily average.