Case Study: Avaya and the FIFA World Cup - April 2005  

Avaya is a fairly rare breed of company, writes Louella Miles and Simon Rines, authors of the business report Football Sponsorship & Commerce. The company designs, builds and manages communications for more than a million businesses worldwide, which includes more than 90% of the Fortune 500. It also happened to be the first purely business-to-business sponsor of the FIFA World Cup.

Formerly known as the Enterprise Networks Group of Lucent Technologies (itself a spin-off from AT&T), and headquartered in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, USA, Avaya began trading independently in the third quarter of 2000. The company had a customer base of nearly one million across more than 90 countries for their communications software, products and services. When competing for global business, however, this represents just a drop in the ocean. The challenge for Avaya was how to grow its business, and awareness, within a clearly defined target base.
By a happy coincidence, its business requirements happened to match the needs of the global soccer federation FIFA, which was keen for Avaya input to make the 2002 World Cup a global communications success. The sponsorship, meanwhile, enabled Avaya to boost awareness among executives and IT decision-makers worldwide.

Background

Even though it came into the sponsorship fairly late, Avaya hit the ground running. It saw the championship as the ideal opportunity to showcase its technology, with its products powering data and voice networks at all 20 of the 2002 World Cup venues. The hardest part of Avaya’s task was to communicate what it did – ‘converged’ voice and data networks. These are being used increasingly by businesses and organisations as a way to save money and to simplify network administration.
The network that Avaya designed, installed and managed for FIFA proved to be one of the largest of its kind, connecting more than 10,000 data and communications devices and offering more than 40,000 connections and 15,000 telephony extensions for the federation’s network users.
FIFA wanted seamless communication for a tournament that was taking place in two different countries (Korea and Japan), with all the distance problems that this setup could present. Most of the 20 new stadia and two major media centres were still under construction, while international tensions had raised new concerns about terrorism and network security.
Avaya’s converged voice and data infrastructure, called Enterprise Class Internet Protocol Solutions (ECLIPS) would bring more service to more people with less equipment. The downside was that the network, part of the company’s $100m six-year commitment (a mix of money and support in kind) to World Cup soccer, would need to be built in one-third the usual time for such orders.

Sponsorship objectives

Avaya was probably more realistic than most in terms of its objectives. As Simon Clarke, EMEA director of corporate brand and marketing services at Avaya, puts it: “We sponsored the 2002 World Cup and are sponsoring the 2006 tournament, not because it is the biggest sporting event on the planet, but the biggest communications event, and during the month of June it has more communications than any business in the world.”
The company was also building for the future because it knew that if its involvement with FIFA did prove successful, it could provide not just one but a number of different case studies, looking at different solutions and relevant to different sectors.
This was going to be “particularly useful” to their business, says Clarke, “where the companies in these various sectors feel that they are unique because of their specific requirements, such as finance and retail.”
“If you take one case study like football [soccer], which has no specific relevance but generates interest across the board, you can draw a parallel between football and all of them. It makes for a fantastic story. And when we use the football content, which interests all of them, rather than a boring sales message, and can demonstrate that this message was brought to you using Avaya technology, it makes our marketing much easier.”
Avaya is using soccer in a slightly different way to the consumer world. Most other sponsors would point to the fact that they tap in to the emotion of soccer. Avaya, however, remained focused on the content, and the event’s popularity, using the imagery to reinforce its message. It freely admits, though, that it is not wedded to the sport itself – if another sporting event had been of the same size, it might have gone another route.

Marketing issues

Avaya came into the sponsorship fairly late in the day, barely seven months before the tournament, so it didn’t have the great build-up of preparatory time available to other sponsors. Its involvement also happened fairly shortly after the company was hived off from Lucent. This meant that it had obvious brand awareness issues, not just in building up an identity for the company but also for its solutions outside the US. It is not a mass market brand – being in the B2B market, 99.9% of the world’s population is not its target audience. As Clarke puts it: “We are not interested in putting our logo up and getting that 99.9% aware of who we are. It’s about using the content and going for that 0.1% and using it in a slightly different way – online credits have slightly less relevance for us than for the consumer market.”

Marketing tactics

However, it used its sponsorship as content very successfully. In EMEA, this manifested in the launch of a viral campaign and the sponsorship of www.sports.com, an online reporting service, which saw a 200% increase in web traffic during the period. At the time, www.sports.com was the most visited dedicated sports website in Europe. Avaya sponsored a specific section on the World Cup, featuring live match reports, player-by-player analysis and a critique of how they performed. It generated 118m impressions of the Avaya logo on the site, and proved a useful alternative to just putting a World Cup logo on Avaya’s own site – rewarding the company’s creativity.
“It was good for us in that most people were at work when the games were played but still wanted to know what was going on,” says Clarke. “So they could download one of the tickertapes which ran along the bottom of the screen, complete with Avaya branding, and for the 90 minutes the game lasted, we had our logo on someone’s PC. They could then click to our website to find out what we were about.”
Its viral campaign, meanwhile, took another element of soccer: humour. It sourced a number of clips of players in embarrassing situations – missing goals, falling over their feet etc. – from various countries worldwide, and then produced nation-specific viral campaigns. All of these contained a link to the Avaya site.
Avaya is not a company with unlimited funds for advertising, so though it advertises worldwide, it had to be fairly selective in its support. It focused on four main markets: the US, UK, Japan and Korea. The media schedule was mixed, targeting a business audience, using some of the quality broadsheets selectively, but also the business and IT press. It focused exclusively on print-based ads, using soccer imagery based on what it was doing for FIFA, but built around a business context.

Results

The true test of a sponsorship is whether it meets its objectives. In B2B, such measurements should, by rights, be slightly easier than in the consumer arena, where the sheer number of marketing methods used can make it difficult to isolate the effectiveness of the sponsorship element. In Avaya’s case, however, the nature of its products and the lengthy sales cycle make matters more complicated. Some sales were obviously made via the showcasing at the World Cup, while some equipment was provided as part of its deal, but the latter cannot be classed as revenue.
Clarke explains it thus: “Particularly when you are a young company, it’s about establishing credibility, getting yourself on the shopping sales list. It’s about when you get a salesman through the door knowing that he doesn’t have to spend the first 15 minutes explaining who Avaya is and, because the customer knows of us because of exposure on TV, our salesmen have instant credibility.”
The downside, he continues, is that even if a sale results from such a visit, it cannot be attributed directly to the sponsorship of the World Cup. “It’s difficult to put an ROI against it because if the sale takes 18 months, you can touch and influence it, but can’t directly say because we took that customer to the World Cup final, he signed a cheque for $2m.”

The company did, however, carry out pre- and post-event awareness testing. Within the UK, it witnessed a healthy increase – approximately 10% – and a significant rise in the number of hits on its website and increased interest in the company as a whole.
Having said that, awareness of the company outside of the US before the World Cup was relatively low. So in the UK, having started from scratch, Avaya embarked on a big launch campaign just before the World Cup which saw it hit the mid-30s; after the World Cup, awareness jumped to over 50% in its core target group of IT decision makers and CEOs.
Avaya counts itself well satisfied with this performance, and it is currently undertaking renewed brand tracking to benchmark awareness before its next round of marketing activity. The reason it feels that its investment has worked so well is that it explored every opportunity to leverage its sponsorship, with all marketing activity containing a soccer content or flavour. It is currently taking stock of the options open to it before the next World Cup. As many other companies in this area are finding, times are tough, and it is having to be fairly selective about marketing funds.

Conclusion

Technology and solutions providers face possibly the most difficult task as sponsors. They want to gain awareness for what, at times, is a nebulous concept and for products that struggle to achieve differentiation. Avaya, however, homed in on its target audience – that elusive 0.1% - and set about making an impression. It was fortunate in having such a ‘top of mind’ vehicle in the World Cup, but it does appear to have milked the tournament for all its worth and broken new ground in the area of business-to-business sponsorships.
Avaya succeeded by weaving the World Cup logo into all its activities and promoting its name. There are few, if any, higher profile showcases for Avaya technology and for ‘converged’ voice and data networks. Given that the company did not have unlimited funds, it has also proved successful at stretching them by encouraging its business partners to use customised advertising templates to mount their own campaigns. It was also realistic to focus on the World Cup, which it considered appropriate to reach its target audience – and jettisoned other sponsorships that might have distracted. It will be fascinating to watch what Avaya has learned from this experience.

The above is an edited version of a case study that appears in Football Sponsorship & Commerce, written by Louella Miles and Simon Rines and published by International Marketing Reports (www.imrpublications.com)

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