Advertising During the World Cup: The Benefits of Emotion

The New York Times revealed that FIFA are expecting to generate $6.1bn in revenue, which is up $1.3bn from last year; cementing this year’s tournament as the biggest sporting spectacle of all time.

11 July 2018

The author(s)

Matt Hearn Creative Excellence
Eleanor Thornton-Firkin Head of Creative Excellence

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A record breaking 3.4 billion people worldwide are expected to tune in to this summer’s World Cup, with emotions running high, as people cheer on their nations for the greatest prize in International Football.

We wanted to understand the impact the emotional response to the World Cup has on advertising. Do people become more emotionally engaged with ads that explicitly refer to the tournament? Can brands ride the back of this emotional wave? And if so, how?

To find this out, we exposed people to 4 different World Cup/Football related ads and used Electroencephalography (EEG), combined with eye tracking, to monitor the unconscious response to the ads both before the World Cup and after England had defeated Colombia.

The results showed that:

Context does make a difference and that, as personal investment in the world cup grew, so did emotional engagement with some of the ads.
The ads that benefitted are the ones that fully committed to the tournament by having explicit links to the World Cup e.g. England football or a specific patriotic tone.