One of the world's largest sports marketing firms, Octagon Marketing lived up to its global status when Octagon South Africa and client MTN SA won Best Sponsorship of a Sport Event for MTN's sponsorship of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ at the inaugural Virgin Active Sport Industry Awards held at Emperor's Palace last night.
Appointed in 2008 to manage MTN's 2010 FIFA World Cup™ portfolio, Octagon handled all aspects of the sponsorship programme from strategic planning and research to hospitality, event activation, procurement, internal activations and PR.
"We have a long-standing partnership with MTN dating back to 1994. While working on the World Cup was certainly a project like no other, MTN and Octagon's 'one-team' approach, coupled with hard work, dedication and our World Cup experience stood us in good stead," said Qondisa Ngwenya, Managing Director of Octagon South Africa.
Ngwenya remarked that the passion of MTN's leaders to leverage this sponsorship as a core marketing platform paved the way for an unforgettable and truly 'Ayoba' sponsorship programme that delivered against the brands key objectives. "We are truly grateful to have had the opportunity to work on the world's most-watched event with the first-ever African global sponsor. We're proud to have been part of the team that brought Ayoba to life!" said Ngwenya.
Creativity in campaign conceptualisation, as seen in MTN's Last Minute Tickets initiative, was married with more logistically-led delivery challenges such as managing over 20,000 tickets for guests and staff and implementing several, tiered hospitality programmes. In terms of event activation, a total of 2,022 staff staged an incredible 874 events over one month for MTN, engaging 3.3 million fans in stadia and at FIFA Fan Fests, MTN Fan Zones and MTN eKasi TV sites, amongst others.
"That translates to one event per day for over two years. The demands on the team were incredible. And we haven't even touched on the period leading up to the tournament, such as deployment of three mobile, state-of-the-art Gig Rigs that traversed the country over 15 months to engage football fans in every corner of South Africa," comments Ngwenya.
In addition to managing the MTN account, Octagon managed the centrepiece FIFA World Cup™ programmes of five other FIFA clients including A-B InBev, Coca-Cola, Powerade, Kia and Sony - the largest number of client sponsor activations in any of the six FIFA World Cup tournaments it has experienced. Octagon was also solely appointed by the African Union of Broadcasters to manage broadcast rights sales for the 2010 FIFA World CupTM for sub-Saharan Africa.
For 25+ years, Octagon has been involved at every level of football around the world. The World Cup activity in South Africa was part of a larger agency football portfolio that continues to grow globally, including Brazil, where the agency has bolstered its presence in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup™.
Octagon was also short-listed for awards in four other categories:
Sport Agency of the Year
Sport Team of the Year - MTN Energade Pro Cycling Team
Technological Innovation in Sport - for 3Dworld created by Sony
CSR Award - MTN Qhubeka Partnership
For more information please contact Tracy Price: or (011) 506 4400.
About Octagon Octagon (IPG: NYSE) is the world's largest sports and entertainment sponsorship consulting practice and a pioneer and leader in athlete & personality representation & management. With more than 800 employees worldwide, Octagon works with hundreds of blue-chip corporate clients, more than 800 athletes & personality clients and manages more than 5,000 events per year.
