Massive sponsorship deals can blunt marketing

At the end of the first week of the recent World Cup, my company received a legal warning from FIFA. We operate a new app that allows fans to make sports predictions against friends, using wagers other than money. Instead of staking cash they can bet anything from pizzas to replica shirts on match results.

FIFA got in touch with us because we'd approached one of McDonald's marketing agencies to see if they were interested in working with us on a quarter-pounder burger stake for the quarter-final stage of the tournament. In response to our enquiry the agency in question accused us of ambush marketing, before then reporting us to FIFA, who in turn warned us that we were infringing their IP rights by using the words World Cup in our app.

Unsurprisingly we complied with FIFA's request to remove any offending words and replace them with ones that even they cannot trademark. Regardless of the rather absurd prohibition of common language that sports rights owners seem able to secure, like most companies, we lack either the resources or appetite for a legal scrap with FIFA.

Whilst the episode produced no lasting scars, being at the sharp end of FIFA's stick makes you think a bit more about the commercial intent of the people wielding it.

As we all know FIFA makes good money from commercial sponsors. Roughly one third of the organisation's revenues in 2013 came from the sponsorship budgets of affiliated brands. The major partners, who reportedly pay some $25m-$50m per year for this privilege, include Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai, Sony and Visa.

Then there are the World Cup sponsors who pay in the range of $10m-$25m for an association with the tournament itself. This group includes Budweiser, Castrol, Continental, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, plus a bunch of relative newcomers including European organic food producer Moy Park, Brazilian telecom company Oi and Yingli Solar, a solar panel manufacturer.

You would normally expect the collective marketing output of such a footballing armada to dazzle with diversity. Instead, we've just experienced a month of marketing similarity that even the Christmas season would struggle to beat. When every brand is playing football it's hard to tell them apart – except perhaps for the ones who don't appear to play it very well, such as those who chose a footballing ambassador who wouldn't last the first week of the tournament, (Gillette and Joe Hart, Subway and Daniel Sturridge, anyone?).

If there is a silver lining for brands that don't want to pay the FIFA tax to associate with sport, it could be that this year's World Cup may have accidentally blown the whistle on marketing largesse. As the first truly "social" World Cup, there's now a huge amount of digital data to show what works and what doesn't.

Digital media consultancy 25AM based in Cape Town has been tracking global social media conversations during the World Cup to learn what the public said about sponsors. Their analysis reveals that solar panel company Yingli received just 2,782 mentions in social media for being a sponsor, which amounts to $6.29 for every mention they received. By comparison McDonalds was mentioned 2.7m times before the final, at a cost of $6.48 per mention – the price of two Big Macs.

Whilst these may be crude metrics, any of the brands using our app to make their products relevant to sporting audiences would baulk at such prices. Maybe they know something that FIFA probably also knows, that you don't need a licence to sell more products to sports fans, but a way of making them relevant.

John Owrid is founder and chairman of Sporting Mouth.

This article was amended on Friday 25 July 2014 to correct the location listed for 25AM

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