FootballCo and Overtime Team Up For World Cup 2022 Branded Content Offer

In the lead-up to the FIFA World Cup 2022 taking place in Qatar, digital sports brand Overtime and media company Footballco have teamed up to offer a branded content service for advertisers. The partnership, which includes Visit Dubai, will maximize the global audience opportunity around the world’s largest soccer event. The strategic partnership between the two businesses will aim to provide brands and agencies in the U.S. with access to soccer fans, building on the reach Footballco has built outside of core markets such as Europe and APAC through its title Goal.com. The goal will be to create a proposition that will engage Gen Z and Gen A demographic consumers through soccer-related content leading up to and during the month-long competition, which starts Nov. 20. Partnering to reach young Americans Each company will use its commercial partnerships to engage audiences across FootballCo’s portfolio of media brands, including its soccer-focused title Goal, which reaches around 10 million people monthly in America alone, explained Overtime chief revenue officer Rich Calacci. “A major tentpole event like World Cup soccer brings so many American fans into the sport for a short period of time and allows a brand like Overtime, which has a stranglehold across millennial and Gen Z audiences, to partner with Goal.com to bring football back home. It also provides a high-quality opportunity for marketers to extend their reach beyond America,” Calacci told Adweek. Despite a growing interest in soccer in the U.S. in recent years and both the men’s and women's soccer teams qualifying for the forthcoming World Cups, the sport continues to sit behind the dominance of fan interest in American football, basketball and baseball in the country. Footballco’s chief executive Juan Delgado believes that brands have an extra problem when it comes to engagement around live events as younger audiences gravitate away from traditional media broadcasters when watching sports. TikTok, Instagram, Snap and Twitch are where live events are now attracting Gen Z sports viewers. “As a publisher and an influencer, we're required to deliver what our what our audience wants to see,” continued Delgado who cited that the brands across the Footballco portfolio reach over 640 million soccer fans each month. A major tentpole event like World Cup soccer brings so many American fans into the sport for a short period of time.Rich Calacci, chief revenue officer of Overtime Between the two platforms, they aim to offer partners subscribed audiences of millions, with Overtime boasting an audience of 2.31 million subscribers through YouTube while FootballCo's has around 3.4 million combined. On TikTok, they have 20.1 million and 3.4 million followers across all accounts respectively too. These are some of the channels where the branded content produced will be distributed, while Footballco’s inhouse talent, including journalists, will also be involved in distribution. The content plan As for examples of what the branded content will look like, users will potentially see formats designed and produced to run on YouTube with a 10-minute show. It will then be edited down to short-form clips to run across TikTok and Instagram, explained Calacci. The first partnership underway has been developed for Visit Dubai, which hopes to attract fans on their way to Qatar either to vacation or to stay and fly into the host country for the games, instead of being based there. Other brand partners have also signed up, with two understood to be official World Cup sponsors. A marketer's dream? Calacci is also expecting to see an influx in marketers taking the opportunity to tie into the tournament during the annual holiday season, given the timing, which also includes Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It will also act as a potential building ground, with the Women’s World Cup set to take place in Australia and New Zealand next year and the 2026 World Cup will be held in cities across Canada, Mexico and the USA. “This is a marketer's dream,” he declares of the potential audience reach from across both partner organizations, working around one of the world’s largest global events during the busiest shopping period of the year. The partnership is expected to continue beyond the 2022 World Cup for future sporting events too. This Year's World Cup Is a Key Performance Marketing Opportunity for US Brands