18,850 accredited media representatives, 73,072 hours of TV coverage on 376 channels in 214 countries, 26.3 billion TV spectators, 4.2 billion hits on the official website, 18 billion spectators at the 15 official public viewing locations (where fan items were sold in the 24 merchandising shops and 720 of the 4,000 broadcasting hours were filled with sponsor contents) – these are the impressive media figures of the 2006 FIFA Football World Cup in Germany.

Large sporting events have long since become advertising platforms on a gigantic scale: Whether sponsoring, merchandising or simply picking up on the theme for one’s advertising strategy – nearly every company takes advantage of the emotion-charged environment of a Football World Cup, the Olympic Games or other global (or even national) sporting events. The 2010 World Cup in South Africa is not going to be an exception either: A representative survey of a German agency carried out among marketing decision-makers from the industry and trade revealed that 50% of the companies definitely want to make use of the 2010 World Cup as a promotion theme. A further 23% have not yet decided, but can well imagine launching a promotion campaign on the topic. However, using major sporting events as the basis for an advertising strategy is not totally unproblematic – due to the trademark rights. For instance the FIFA had the terms “World Cup 2010“, “South Africa 2010“, “2010 FIFA World Cup“, “2010“, “Twenty Ten“ as well as the mascot, the logo and the World Cup trophy patented from the very start, both as words and image brands. Companies that want to use the official slogans, logos or FIFA images for their promotion purposes, have to pay licensing fees – if they are allowed to purchase the brand rights at all, because the official partners and sponsors of the FIFA World Cup also have a word in the matter: Adidas, Coca-Cola, Sony, VISA, Hyundai and co. pay many millions of euros so that exclusively their brand names crop up on the World Cup scene.