World cup TV viewership could reach half a billion

FIFA's cumulative estimate is based on roughly 435 million people watching a large proportion of the games, while those media estimates are based on a figure of 145 million viewers. There are numerous indicators suggesting that the actual viewership figure could be somewhere in the region of 500 million.

Even Vietnam is watching

Research just conducted in Vietnam, which has not got a team in the world cup, nor is it supposed to be a soccer-mad country, shows that 78% of Vietnamese insist they will be watching the world cup on TV. Given the country's population of approximately 80 million, this means that more than 60 million TV viewers in Vietnam alone will be watching the games.

Add to that the fact that the US has the highest number of fans making the trip to South Africa as a result of the tremendous upsurge in soccer in that country, and an extremely conservative estimate would be at least of 100 million viewers in the US.

Then, of course, one has to add the whole of South America with a population of 382 million and Europe with 830 million citizens, who will all be able to watch the games in real time, being in roughly the same time zone as South Africa.

Massive TV news coverage

Given the extensive coverage that global TV news stations such as BBC World Sky, CNN, the US networks and Al Jazeera are giving to the 2010 World Cup - significantly more airtime than ever before - there is no question that far more TV viewers will watch these games than ever before in the history of the world cup. FIFA's profit, which is derived mostly from TV rights, is 50% more than earnings from the last World Cup in Germany. Which in itself indicates a lot more interest than ever before from TV channels and viewers.

In addition, the bulk of the TV feed is in high definition, as well as some of it in 3D, for the first time.

Another unexpected chunk of viewership will also come from news coverage of the colourful enthusiasm that the South African public has injected into the event, prompting a lot of new viewers to become caught up in the hype. It can safely be said that ordinary South Africans can now claim to have done a better job marketing this country in just a few days than the cumulative efforts of our departments of tourism for the past 100 years.

Do the sums

Simple arithmetic shows that if TV viewership does reach the 500 million mark, if only 1% of those people decide to come to South Africa on holiday in the next two or three years, that will more than pay for the total R48 billion world cup bill.

And this isn't even taking into account the massive marketing value of celebrity footballers making use of Twitter to tell their millions of fans how great this country is.

Kaka + Twitter = plenty

The power of a celebrity testimonial in marketing terms is massive. And with social media being such a huge part of a world cup for pretty much the first time, this alone could be just about as persuasive as the TV coverage [even @seppblatter is now on Twitter - managing ed].

Given that the next few weeks continue smoothly and that no favourites are knocked out in the opening rounds, there is every chance that the massive investment this country has made in this event will turn out to produce a healthy return over the next 10 years.

There is already no doubt that no single event in the history of mankind has focused as much media attention on one country. And what a delight it is to see that focus of attention centred on colourful, happy, optimistic, warm and welcoming South Africans. In marketing terms, that alone is priceless.