Sometime around 1.45 am, shortly after the Iranian football team completed their famous and deserved 2-1 victory over the United States, the streets of Tehran filled with surging crowds of people, most of them shouting their praises to Allah. According to reporters in the country, the entire population men and women, the aged and the young watched the game, most of them in a state of frenzied excitement. That is, of course, remarkable, and can be partly attributed to the political antipathy between the nations involved. But in football terms, the Iranian reaction is not exceptional. When Romania beat England 2-1, for example, thanks to a goal in the last minute, a quarter of a million people immediately jammed up the Bulevard Magherus, one of the main shopping streets in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. As it turned midnight, millions across the country began festivities which lasted most of the night. Prime minister Radu Vasile, abroad in Poland, immediately made a live TV broadcast: Get out on the street tonight, we must celebrate. Elsewhere, of course, there are similar stories. Trading on the London Stock Exchange, for example, virtually halted during England games, raising the possibility that those still at their desks could actually distort the market with minor trades. For the crucial game against Argentina, 26 million of a possible 30 million TV viewers were estimated to have watched. And the day after England was eliminated, and after Prime Minister Tony Blair had made his national address, English travel agents reported a 20% increase in holiday bookings. For most Americans, all of this hysteria was greeted with some bemusement. North America has the World Series, the Superbowl, the NBA, and even the Olympics, which the USA now wins with ease. But there is nothing that approaches the World Cup, which captivates nations and stirs up patriotic fervor. Even the presence of the US national ‘soccer’ team in the World Cup failed to stimulate much interest among US citizens. In fact, a reported 52% of the population did not know that the World Cup was a soccer tournament.
Goal
No one can level such charges of ignorance at the senior executives running Hewlett-Packard, the computer giant which, some three years ago, jumped at the opportunity to become one of the prime sponsors of the France 98 World Cup. The fact that several top HP executives are European may have played a role in their decision to become part of what the company boldly calls The biggest event in human history. Part of its reasoning was that, whatever happened to the US team, HP would be able to boost its international profile. Not only was HP’s logo prominently displayed on billboards throughout every World Cup match, but throughout June and July, top HP executives found a string of decision-making managers from customers all over the world were willing to give up their time and spend it with HP in France. These were senior people who usually show little interest in big golf or tennis tournaments. HP, of course, was not alone. EDS, the systems integrator, and Sybase, the database supplier, among others, also won key sponsorship bids. And the small electronic commerce company iCAT, which built the online shop, also enjoyed huge publicity. Meanwhile Sun Microsystems, desperately concerned that its revolutionary computer environment Java is losing momentum must surely regret that it decided not to renew its contract with FIFA, the international footballing body. It decided to switch its sponsorship to the Americas Cup, another US dominated event; and Indy Car racing. Both of these are popular, but in global football terms, are tiny niche events. But surely the one company that was most envious of HP’s role was IBM. Five years ago, IBM splashed out hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the rights to be the main sponsor of the Olympic games for 1996, 2000 and 2004 and the associated winter Olympics. But it has hardly been a great success: In the US, where the Olympics is more popular than anywhere else in the world, IBM is already well known. Outside the US, where IBM’s name is less recognized, interest in the Olympics is sporadic and usually dispassionate.
Technology free
But for IBM, HP’s real achievement was to sponsor an event where, in spite of the Web sites, computers are not really needed. And that means little can go wrong: At the Atlanta games, IBM’s results reporting system became so overloaded that it began to report incorrect results to the press, turning the whole episode into a public relations disaster from which IBM has yet to recover. And last week, IBM announced it was pulling out as official worldwide sponsor for the games, following disagreements over price with the International Olympic Committee. It said it had decided not to sign up to another eight year contract – a deal that would lock the company into sponsoring four more winter and summer games – because it could not justify the investment based on the marketing return we could reasonably expect. The technology required to run the games was becoming more complex, and thus expensive, and IBM said it was no longer prepared to offer it all up for free (CI No 3,470). Meanwhile, the World Cup sponsors from the IT industry can bask in the success of an event which, ultimately, is entirely unsuited to the digital revolution they are driving. It is uncomplicated, non-interactive, and brings nations together through a shared experience delivered by a technically outmoded medium one-to-many broadcasting based on analogue signals television. Andrew Lawrence. This article appeared in the August 1998 issue of Computer Business Review.
