Bring back the IPL cricket marketers for soccer’s sake!!

The FIFA Local Organizing Committee (LOC) has failed dismally to execute an advertising campaign that matches the scale of the FIFA Confederations Cup. There’s now just one week to go until this tournament gets underway and yet the frequency of advertising has not increased substantially.

A month or two ago the excuse we were given was that the IPL Cricket tournament came from nowhere and thus caught the LOC marketers by surprise. They said that they would wait until this tournament ended to avoid their advertising being lost in the heavy clutter of IPL advertising.

The IPL has gone and yet there is still very little advertising going on. Our marketing efforts are so pathetic that a South African who recently visited Brazil was amazed to find much more advertising for the 2014 World Cup that is going to take place there than what is happening here for next year’s tournament. We all know that the rate of both Confed Cup and 2014 ticket sales is alarmingly slow.

Now it seems as if the bar has been lowered – now the LOC marketers are claiming that the 2005 edition of the Confed Cup sold 80% of its ticket allocation and that therefore the 70% they claim to have sold thus far is not so bad after all. They went on to say that with a bit of luck a final burst in the final week towards the tournament, combined with the tickets that will most likely be sold during the tournament, should bring our stats in line with those of the previous edition in Germany.

I say that FIFA should seriously consider bringing the IPL marketers on board to ‘assist’ the LOC incompetents. The IPL team will do a good job, for sure, for the World Cup. It’s too late to do anything about the Confed Cup but the World Cup proper is just too important a tournament to risk on our lot. The question I ask is, what’s wrong with bettering the FIFA Confederations Cup figures from the German edition? What is wrong with selling out all the tickets?

It can be done with the right marketing strategies and plans. Another excuse that was given by the LOC Head of Marketing, Derek Carstens, was that certain games were bound not sell that well due to the low profiles of the teams concerned. He was obviously referring to games between so called football minors such as Iraq. This just shows that Carstens and his team are simply out of their depth.

There are clever ways of selling each and every game. For example tickets for games between the so-called smaller teams could be heavily discounted for schools in the area to get bums onto seats. Say two small teams are playing at Coca-Cola Park for instance and only 20% of the tickets have been sold.

In this instance LOC could run a promotion at all the schools in the stadium’s hinterland whereby all tickets for students are sold at say 10% of their normal cost – the tickets could be sold via the schools as a way of promoting soccer in general amongst the kids and getting 10% of the revenue for every seat rather than zero.

This would help such games to maximize revenue. There are many other ways of selling these tickets which I won’t mention since I am not being paid to do so. I say, enough with the excuses from the LOC team. Shape up or ship out.