Tag Archives: Cnn

R 2 billion World Cup coverage for brand “South Africa”

The value of the coverage for brand “South Africa” could exceed R 2 billion in the 30 day period of the 2010 World Cup, writes respected marketing consultant and writer Chris Moerdyk, reports bizcommunity.com.

Moerdyk calculated the brand exposure value as follows: for each of the 64 matches the broadcasters have to allow FIFA 14 minutes of airtime, of which the soccer body has promised 2 minutes will go to marketing South Africa.  With 28 billion cumulative viewers expected to watch the soccer tournament around the world, according to FIFA, the value of South Africa’s exposure is R 1,5 billion.  In addition, the 30 minute opening and closing ceremonies, newspaper and magazine coverage, TV coverage in the form of pre-World Cup documentaries on BBC, SkyNews, CNN, and ZDF, as well as the soccer players and their fans posting comments on Facebook and Twitter, will add at least a further R 500 million in value.  Brazilian soccer star Kaka wrote on Twitter “Just arrived in South Africa … Amazing atmosphere!!”, a country endorsement said to be “priceless” in value.

Moerdyk quotes other figures by highly regarded local media planners Dick Reed and Heiner Kuehnel, who question FIFA’s optimistic TV viewership figures for the World Cup, saying only 125 million soccer fans will watch each match, giving a total cumulative TV audience of 8 billion, an advertising TV exposure value of R 800 million, and therefore a reduced total exposure value of R1,3 billion.

Whichever calculation method is used to estimate the TV viewership, even the lower value of exposure will exceed any marketing budget S A Tourism or the International Marketing Council will have ever spent on marketing brand “South Africa”.

It is interesting to note that locals are becoming vocal on Twitter in criticising SkyNews for its negative reporting about South Africa.  The TV channel has been happy to accept S A Tourism’s advertising budget for the past year, and will state that its editorial independence is separate to its advertising income!

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com

S A marketing wins gold

S A Tourism’s advertising campaign for South Africa has won an international advertising award for CNN.

The International Awards for Innovation in Media awarded a gold award to the S A Tourism promotion run on CNN, called “My South Africa”.   Viewers were asked to send photographs, moving images and stories that reflected their experiences of South Africa, which were featured on the “My South Africa” website.   Call-to-action vignettes were also created, the first featuring well-known singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka.

The campaign is to be used as a case study at Oxford University’s Business School.   The campaign will run until 2010, to support the World Cup.

Marketing key in tourism downturn

Destination marketing takes on an even more important role in times of a global financial crisis, so that a country can achieve awareness amongst its target market when the global economy recovers.

This is the message S A Tourism CEO Moeketsi Mosola brought to the tourism industry this week, after the August arrival statistics were released. and reflected a slowdown in the arrivals growth rate, to 6 %.   Tourism growth has been double-digit in the past.

Mosola warned the industry of difficult times ahead, and said that the industry should not lose heart, even though he acknowledged that the arrivals information indicated that the credit crunch was affecting tourism for the first time.   “The industry at large was reporting its worst results since the outbreak of SARS in 2003” says the S A Tourism media release, but is in line with global tourism market conditions.

In line with its destination market strategy to aggressively market the country in general, and especially for the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, S A Tourism will be launching advertising campaigns on CNN, BBC, Eurosport and in cinemas in 2009.   It already has a regular presence on SkyNews, showing a hot air balloon over a beautiful landscape.

Mosola encourages the industry to use the downturn to invite the media and tour operators to experience their products and services, and the country’s “variety and depth of travel experiences South Africa offers leisure travellers”, to be ready for the upturn.    He also encourages the industry to focus on domestic marketing.

Just a week prior, S A Tourism’s Didi Moyle had said that her organisation was “monitoring the economic turmoil ‘closely’, but that there had been no decline in tourism arrivals to South Africa”, reports the Cape Argus.   She had said that the credit crunch could be positive for South Africa, due to the undervalued Rand, but that fewer tourists would visit South Africa as they would rather travel in their own countries.

Arrivals in August showed good growth from France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, India, USA, Canada, and Australia, whilst it was flat for the UK and Germany, two of the three most important overseas source markets making up just less than half a million visitors.    Arrivals from China, Japan, and Italy also were relatively flat.   Only Japan showed a decline in arrivals, by 3 %.