[July 14, 2014]

2014 World Cup Stands As Biggest Video Event of All Time

Visible Measures (News - Alert), the leader in video content marketing, today announced that the 2014 World Cup brought in record branded video viewership, reaching 671.6 million views and making it the single biggest branded video event to date.

The World Cup is the biggest media event in the world, reaching more than three billion fans worldwide, but branded video was still an emerging medium during the 2010 World Cup with major brands just starting to generate significant consumer engagement through targeted campaigns. Four years later - after those brands experienced key learnings from events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl in the U.S. - they were ready to make a big splash with compelling and highly evocative video campaigns. With the average World Cup campaign nearly tripling the average viewership of a branded video campaign in 2013, brands have demonstrated the true potential of a global event such as the World Cup.

Using its True Reach® measurement and analysis platform, Visible Measures has accurately assessed total World Cup video viewership, which video campaigns received the most views, and the brands that dominated mindshare during this major sporting event.

The True Reach metric - renowned as the gold standard of online video viewership measurement and used by Ad Age, The Wall Street Journal, leading brands, advertising agencies, and publishers - provides the most accurate and reliable way to quantify views associated to viral videos. For marketers, it measures the viewership of brand-syndicated videos, as well as associated user-uploaded copies driven by viewers, across hundreds of the web's most visited video sites.

• Total Branded Video Viewership: 671.6 Million Views
  • Viewership of the global sporting event was 30% more than that of the 2014 Super Bowl (516.2 million views), which had been the most viewed event to date until June.
  • To put that in context, total World Cup viewership is equivalent to 8% of the total branded video views in 213.
• Total Campaigns: 97
  • The World Cup had two fewer campaigns than were produced for the 2012 Summer Olympics, the event with the most associated campaigns and the fourth highest viewership of all time.
  • The World Cup generated an average of 6.9 million views per campaign, far above the 2 million view average of campaigns in 2013.
• Nike was the most viewed brand of the tournament, releasing 8 campaigns that garnered 240.6 million views. Here is how other brands performed:

1. Nike: 240,684,123 views
2. Samsung (News - Alert): 124,374,254 views
3. Adidas: 90,314,729 views
4. Kia: 27,841,720 views
5. Beats by Dre: 24,501,341 views

• Nike also had the top two most viewed campaigns (ranked by total views of each video campaign):

1. Nike's "Risk Everything": 122,255,733 views
2. Nike's "The Last Game": 97,148,747 views
3. Samsung's "Galaxy 11: The Training": 74,573,179 views
4. Adidas' "The Dream": 45,959,914 views
5. Samsung's "Galaxy 11": 38,306,205 views

"As evidenced by the exploding engagement rates, watching and sharing branded video has become a key part of the World Cup action," said Visible Measures Founder and CEO Brian Shin. "Based on our analysis, we have found that brands are placing more emphasis on creating higher-quality video that emphasize compelling storytelling and a longer narrative to hook viewers. The average length of the top ten most viewed tournament campaigns is 3:15, which is a minute and a half longer than the average top Super Bowl campaign."

Shin also pointed out that the use of celebrities, specifically popular soccer players, in the top World Cup videos helped drive greater engagement. About half of the World Cup campaigns measured featured soccer stars to capitalize on built-in fan bases that drive social media conversations and sharing, further spurring earned media. Most brands used more than one soccer star in their video campaigns to further drive worldwide engagement.

The most widely used celebrity in this year's World Cup videos was Lionel Messi, who starred in 11 campaigns. Yet the soccer star who received the most video views was Cristiano Ronaldo, who starred in Nike's biggest campaigns, as well as campaigns from Samsung and Emirates.

For more data about World Cup branded video, including complete lists of the top performing campaigns, brands, and celebrities, please visit the Visible Measures Blog at www.visiblemeasures.com/insights

About Visible Measures
Visible Measures is the platform for inspired video advertising that consumers embrace and endorse. By connecting its unrivaled video dataset with advertising that is built to give consumers choice in what they watch, Visible Measures drives maximum engagement for its global brands, agencies, trading desks, and publisher clients, which include Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestle, VivaKi, and Condé Nast. Visit us online at http://www.visiblemeasures.com or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @Visiblemeasures.

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