The Biggest European Championship Ever: How Did the Advertisers Do?

Who turned out to be the dark horse? Who just came for the party? And who are the old faces that always run this kind of marketing?

Bicycle kick. Goal.

Swiss player Xherdan Shaqiri's golden goal is widely reckoned the finest moment since the European Championship kicked off on June 11. Some are already calling it the goal of the tournament — a strike that imaginative is usually something you see only in Captain Tsubasa or a Pro Evolution Soccer game.

Amid the extravagant praise from media and fans everywhere, the hottest comments on Chinese social platforms stood out as something else entirely: this may be the hardest moment yet for the Haier Brothers.

In the 24 hours after the goal, and probably longer, the replay — with a Ronshen refrigerator billboard behind it — ran again and again on television in the 230 countries taking the broadcast, was cut into GIFs that spread across social media, and was even chosen by The New York Times as the cover frame for its video.

The head of branding at Hisense Group excitedly posted twice in a row to his Moments feed, calling it "the Ronshen bicycle kick." Many people still do not seem to know that this oldest of Chinese domestic refrigerator brands has already been bought by Hisense.

A Weibo hashtag, #RonshenBicycleKick#, appeared almost at once, and by the following midday the official Weibo accounts of one outlet after another were posting about it — all so neatly done that it looked arranged in advance.

Over the 36 group-stage matches played so far, Hisense's advertising has been on screen an average of eight minutes a match, of which the live cameras catch two to three minutes. All ten top-tier Euro 2016 sponsors, Adidas, Coca-Cola and McDonald's among them, hold the same rights.

Besides welcoming its first Chinese top-tier sponsor in 56 years, the 2016 European Championship in France is an unusual edition in its own right. The field grew from 16 teams to 24 for the first time, making it the largest European Championship ever held.

The most direct beneficiary is of course UEFA: the tournament is expected to bring in €2 billion, 40% more than four years ago. On top of higher ticket sales, broadcast rights alone should yield €1.05 billion, up 25% from the 2012 European Championship.

Given that the Brazil World Cup's broadcast income came to less than €1.9 billion across a dozen more matches than the Euros, the enlarged European Championship is now close to the World Cup in commercial value.

The first European Championship finals had four teams, then eight; in 1996 the field went to 16, after the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke up in the early 1990s and UEFA's membership shot up. The third expansion, in 2016, pushed through by Michel Platini, looks plainly ambitious.

The UEFA president, currently serving a four-year ban handed down by FIFA, has argued hard for a 2020 European Championship spread across 13 countries. Which is to say that the single-host tradition may never come back.

"In the past the Euros ran its commercial side fairly conservatively. It had a more or less fixed circle of sponsors and wasn't that keen on Chinese brands," Liu Wenjian, Hisense's head of media relations, told QDaily. "But now they need to expand in China too."

As sport, the enlarged tournament has drawn complaints of being "a bit dull." The groups of death are not deadly enough, and the group stage has lost some of its bite. But for sponsors the match count has gone up, concretely, from 31 to 51, and the tournament has stretched from three weeks to four — a large increase in advertising exposure.

Guotai Junan Securities forecasts that this year's tournament will draw a cumulative television audience of 6.6 billion views, 2 billion more than the last Euros, with over 1.2 billion of those views from China alone.

For one month, the European Championship works its way into every pore of your life. Whether you are a real fan or only pretending to follow, the big companies will not let the marketing chance pass.

What Is Hisense Working So Hard For?

Chinese characters on the advertising boards of international sport stopped being news a while ago — from "Yingli China" at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa to the very long Chinese-language ad plastered across the Premier League: "Sportsdirect.com is now on Tmall Global, 50% off from December 6."

Hisense's move was still a surprise. As one internet commenter put it: the biggest shock of Euro 2016 was the Netherlands failing to qualify, and the biggest dark horse was Hisense's advertising.

Liu Wenjian says it took 16 hours from hearing about the opening to signing off on the sponsorship. Hisense will not disclose the sum, but at the standard rate of €50 million for four years of top-tier Euro rights, its two-year deal must run into the tens of millions of euros.

That looks like something of a gamble. On returns, far more Chinese sports viewers care about the World Cup and the Olympics than about the European Championship. And because mobile internet and social media now reach everyone, an official sponsor can no longer monopolize a top-tier event.

Lean only on the official channels, which are relatively conservative, and you cannot take sports marketing "deep" or "all the way" — which makes the purchase too expensive. Take Yingli's World Cup sponsorship: US$70 million bought little more than the attention of ordinary Chinese consumers, and year after year of losses hardly argues that the deal worked.

China is still Hisense's main market, but its overseas business is where the profit growth is. In the first three quarters of 2015, Hisense led the industry in export share for both televisions and cold-storage products. In Australia, South Africa and Mexico, its television sales all ranked in the top three. After buying Sharp last year, it set itself the goal of a top-three place in the United States.

Europe is one of the markets Hisense cares about most right now. "A market share of 1-15% is the sweet spot for marketing, and that is exactly where Hisense stands in Europe. Everywhere else — the U.S., the Middle East and Africa — our share is already higher than that."

By Liu Wenjian's account, Hisense has set up offices in five European countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. All five happen to be footballing powers. "The Euros are especially hot in the European market. If we can do well there, we'll be satisfied."

What Hisense sells in Europe is mostly televisions, refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners. As of May 2016 it had 20 million television users worldwide, about 4 million of them abroad.

On results so far: as of June 22, Hisense's screen time was worth 890 fifteen-second CCTV spots, or about 300 million yuan of CCTV hard-advertising value. The company reckons that by the end of the group stage it had "already recouped the whole sponsorship outlay" from the Chinese market alone.

Figures from the ratings researcher CSM show that as of June 15 CCTV's live Euro broadcasts averaged a 1.49% rating and peaked at 3.947% — about what a breakout Chinese variety show averages — with more than 35 million viewers at home watching regularly.

But Hisense seems to have forgotten the point that matters: it went after those viewers in Europe, and the noise at home does nothing for that. Hisense says it of course also hopes to raise its brand favorability in China along the way; its own brand research shows it is not well known among the young, which is why it lined up livestreams on Douyu and a "Hisense Football Babes" campaign aimed at people born in the 1990s and 2000s. But goodwill accumulates only through sustained brand marketing.

There is another way to do the arithmetic on Hisense's bargain. "The endorsement of a top-tier event like the European Championship saves a sponsor five to eight years of persuading overseas consumers. McDonald's, Adidas, Samsung and Philips all became global brands on the back of the three great sporting events," says Ding Minghao, vice president of operations at Shankai Sports, the firm that brought Hisense and UEFA together.

We're Not Sponsors, But Everyone Thinks We Are

Adidas sponsors more teams at Euro 2016 than any other sporting-goods company: 10 of the 24 sides wear its kit, including Belgium's Red Devils, world champions Germany and defending European champions Spain. As the undisputed leader in football, Adidas has long been an official sponsor of both the World Cup and the Euros, supplying the match ball, the goods and the equipment.

But Adidas is not necessarily the sporting-goods company you notice most.

The most eye-catching sports ad of 2016 may be The Switch, which Cristiano Ronaldo shot for Nike: at five minutes and 57 seconds, the longest ad Nike has ever made. Nike came to football later than Adidas, but it is very good at tying its logo and its products to teams and to stars.

Using a big event to get the effect of sponsorship without paying for it is called ambush marketing. Top-tier events such as the Euros, the Olympics and the World Cup are easy targets, and Nike is a master of the form.

At the 2012 London Olympics, Nike, not an Olympic sponsor, could not use the Olympic logo or the words "London Olympics" or "Olympic" in its copy. Inside those limits it still built a whole series of "Find Your Greatness" ads for social media.

Nike was everywhere, yet the organizing committee, having examined the elements it used — East London in South Africa, Little London in Jamaica, London in Ohio, and a gym simply called London — had to concede that this cutting of corners broke no rules.

A report by a marketing company called RadiumOne makes the point that many of the brands people most closely link to the Euros are not sponsors at all. RadiumOne asked 1,000 British football fans to name five brands connected with the tournament; 9% named Nike. Besides Nike, brands wrongly thought to be involved included Mastercard, Visa, Heineken, Barclays and Budweiser.

The top two, Coca-Cola (12%) and Adidas (11%), really are official sponsors. But other official sponsors — Orange, Hisense and Hyundai among them — together drew less than 1% recognition in the survey.

The Familiar Faces at the Euros

How hard is a Euro ticket to come by? UEFA's first presale opened last June, and for the popular matches you might have had to enter a ballot. The first phase, completed last July, sold out its 1 million tickets. As of June 16, 15 million fans from 209 countries and territories had applied.

This year's tournament issued 10 "tickets" to become a Global Partner, each with a face value in the tens of millions of euros.

Like the Olympics and the World Cup, the European Championship grades its sponsors, chiefly into global sponsors and national sponsors.

The 2012 European Championship signed nine top-tier sponsors in all. Alongside the familiar faces — Adidas, Carlsberg, Coca-Cola, Hyundai-Kia, the French telecom company Orange and McDonald's — this year's newcomers are the Chinese television maker Hisense, the German tire maker Continental, the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR and Turkish Airlines. Sponsorship income is up 40% on 2012.

A few of these brands are long-standing diehards. Carlsberg has sponsored eight consecutive European Championships since 1988, one of the tournament's longest partnerships. At the last Euros it put 70% of its entire group marketing budget into event marketing. For its latest four-year contract it paid roughly €80 million.

We have written before about Carlsberg's busy Euro marketing — the scene it staged on the London Underground, where anyone who gave up a seat won a Euro ticket, for instance. Carlsberg also released a brand film as handsome as a costume drama, set during the French Revolution, in which the ticketless masses in the street sound the revolutionary horn and bear down on the well-dressed, bewigged and begowned ticket holders.

Carlsberg buried all sorts of small easter eggs in the ad that only a real fan would catch.

We called the people responsible for Carlsberg's China market, and its domestic Euro marketing sounds largely promotional: giving tickets away through its Tmall flagship store and on social platforms such as Weibo.

The tournament's global standing and scale let Carlsberg extend its name and influence well beyond Europe. Before and during the Euros, Malaysia, China, India and Hong Kong were all very active, and its business in those markets grew noticeably.

Somewhat unexpectedly, not every beer brand makes the Euros its priority for the summer. An executive responsible for one multinational beer brand's China market said flatly that, to her mind, the Euros still do not carry the weight of the Olympics or the World Cup. Open that brand's social media accounts and, sure enough, there is little Euro promotion to be found.

A Tsingtao Beer representative said in an interview that so far the tournament has done little for Tsingtao's own sales, so spending less on marketing around it stands to reason.

A Yanjing Beer employee said the company has always taken a long view of sports marketing and has made no particular investment in the Euros. It had looked at some Euro marketing packages earlier, but the price did not work out and the talks came to nothing. This industry insider added that the price of Euro marketing is climbing fast.

It is not only the Chinese brewers holding back. This tournament has a single beer sponsor, Carlsberg; heavy spenders of the past, Heineken among them, have left the official roster. One insider in overseas beer sales said that "beer plus football" is now standard equipment for fans in many countries, a habit the brewers built with hard cash years ago — and the harvest season has arrived.

Since becoming an official sponsor in 2008, Hyundai-Kia has supplied a dedicated fleet to every European Championship. For Euro 2016, Kia handed the organizing committee 447 cars, including the all-new Sorento L, the third-generation Carens, the Sportage, the Optima, the Soul and the cee'd range built for the European market.

Hyundai did not forget a Euro film of its own, either: two football obsessives, one old and one young, making the case that fan culture is where the sport's charm really lies.

The most harrowing scenes at this year's Euros happened away from the pitch. First came the shadow of terrorism on the eve of the tournament: two explosions near the Stade de France in Paris during a friendly between Germany and France.

Once play began, violence between rival supporters kept escalating. The "England-Russia battle" left 35 injured, and an Irish fan fell to his death from a seaside promenade in Nice. McDonald's France responded on cue with a series of "Let Love Be Stitched Together" outdoor ads, faster off the mark than any other advertiser.

The agency BETC Paris recombined the names of the two countries facing each other into a two-tone fan scarf: Sweden plus Italy makes "Swetaly"; England plus Slovakia makes "Englakia." It put on show the "diversity, love and tolerance" of fans of every place, sex and age.

The line "Come as you are" had been used once before, in McDonald's first ad supporting gay rights.

Beer and Late-Night Snacks Are Standard Euro Kit, and the Delivery Apps Are Delighted

Compared with the 2014 Brazil World Cup, China's online food delivery market is unrecognizable.

During this year's Euros, nearly every mainstream delivery platform ran a dedicated Euro page and promotions with the vendors selling duck necks and beer. If you want to know what the country is talking about, read the ads on the delivery coupons.

According to figures QDaily obtained from several of the big platforms, the Euros have clearly lifted late-night orders. After the opening match, Ele.me's total late-night order volume in Shanghai rose 12.2% week on week. Men in Shanghai placed 58% of those late-night orders and women 42%; but per order, men spent an average of 48.5 yuan against women's 51.1 yuan.

(Note: late night is defined as 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.; the week-on-week comparison is the week after the Euros began against the week before.)

Meituan Waimai's data show that growth at midnight and at 3 a.m. during the Euros outran the average growth in other time slots, with 3 a.m. up the most. Those hours line up with Euro kickoff times. Meituan says it signed up more late-night restaurants before the tournament but has not released the numbers.

Across the platforms, crayfish, beer and skewers — barbecue — are the most ordered categories in the late-night hours, and Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu the busier cities.

Baidu Waimai ran its Euro discounts all day long, so its order peak stayed at lunchtime, up 48.4% on the usual level.

Seen this way, the European Championship is to a delivery platform what Double 11 or 618 is: a pretext for a promotion, a free ride worth taking.

It Looks Like It Has Nothing to Do With the Euros, But Everyone Wants In Anyway

Is Euro marketing aimed only at the small band of real fans who actually watch? Even the people watching are not necessarily serious about it; the fans who follow a club through the league all year tend to go cool once a big international tournament arrives.

Most people watch for the fun of it. City dwellers like, and need, an excuse to cut loose, and one that comes around every four years most of all.

Could you resist a look? You leave the house in the morning and Tencent Sports has renamed every station on Beijing's Subway Line 4 after one of the 24 teams. You call a designated driver at night and Didi has you taking its "Real Fan or Fake Fan" quiz. You switch on the television and the ads for Midea air conditioners, vivo phones, Gionee phones, Flyco shavers, Kia and Mercedes-Benz all hook onto the Euros. You buy something on Taobao, snacks or a T-shirt, and the tournament's name is on it. Your Moments feed scrolls past "A Screen-Ogler's Guide to the Euros" and "How to Talk About the Euros as If You Knew Something," and even the small ads know to file their headlines as "Miss This and It's Like Losing to a Last-Minute Winner." For a couple of days now everyone has started caring about a country with less than a tenth of the population of Beijing's Chaoyang District — Iceland.

Even Jiannanchun has brought out a Euro edition of its Jin Jiannan liquor, the little gold figurine dressed in the kit of Germany, Italy, Spain or France, four versions in all. C'estbon has begun livestreaming Euro dispatches on Tencent — isn't it a bottled-water company? Insurance companies ring you up to talk over terrorist attacks and crowd violence as risks worth covering. Even a bank's repayment reminder finds a way to mention the Euros.

So in the end you gave in. At half past ten at night you turned on the CCTV broadcast and posted to Moments: "Only a dozen minutes left — come on, my beloved Netherlands!"

Just kidding.