MEDIA & MARKETING:'NOW THAT Desperate Housewives is over it's time to surrender to Euro 2012," said RTÉ Two's continuity announcer as the women of Wisteria Lane hugged it out for the final time.
Logically, what she should have said is “now that Desperate Housewives is over, it’s time to start watching Revenge”, but “surrender” is almost certainly the right word when it comes to Euro 2012 – for even if you resolve not to catch a nanosecond of the football, an avalanche of commercial desperation is pre-programmed to spill out of screens and shops alike.
You can try to run but the chances are you’ll trip over some patriotic bunting and fall face down into a vat of Nivea for Men (official skincare supplier to the FAI).
Starter for 10: which company sponsors the Irish team? How about naming its official sports drink or the brand that claims to be the “proud keepers of the Irish Tricolour”?
That last one is technically a London 2012 gig, the answer being Ariel – official Olympic detergent thanks to the fact that parent company Procter Gamble ponied up to be an Olympic partner (in the household products category).
The Football Association of Ireland’s official sports drink, meanwhile, is Lucozade, although the official sports drink of the Euro 2012 tournament itself is Coca-Cola’s Powerade, which claims to “hydrate Europe’s greatest footballers”, as if Europe’s greatest footballers regularly lie supine, mouths open, waiting for the Coke people to come along with a giant hosepipe.
As for the team sponsor, that’s the easy one: mobile telecoms provider 3 is the primary sponsor of the Irish team, with its logo emblazoned across all playing and training gear as part of a €7.5 million four-year deal. Signed with the FAI in August 2010, it was naturally publicised by getting Georgia Salpa to kit up at the Aviva Stadium.
Even if the Republic of Ireland’s team grimly skids its way through three group stage matches without so much as a shot on target, qualification has made 3 instant commercial winners – indeed, if brand exposure from Ireland’s first appearance at a major championship in a decade doesn’t lift those subscriber numbers, it might as well give up.
To put its €7.5 million deal into some kind of perspective, DHL last year paid £40 million (€49 million) to sponsor the training kits of Manchester United for four years, making the commercial worth of Manchester United’s training kit roughly 6½ times that of the Irish national team’s actual playing shirts.
Of course, Manchester United can strike a contract like that, the first of its kind in football, and make it worth DHL’s while, because it’s Manchester United and it’s got 659 million followers, according to a study by market research firm Kantar – or the support of “at least 10 per cent of the world”, as a sceptical MailOnline report put it last week.
For all the official-crisp type malarkey that is going on, the size of the Irish market inevitably restricts the strength in depth of the sponsorships the FAI can rack up, in comparison, say, to the English FA which, when it says it has an “Official Tailor to the England Team”, is not talking about polyester manufactured by Umbro.
Reactivating its “Three Lions, One Tailor” campaign, Marks Spencer has the England team lined up in dark blue suits alongside a trio of felines. It all looks convincing until you remember that football billionaires are unlikely to source their formalwear from a mid- market department store: at least Twiggy looks like she might shop there occasionally.
But why be a sponsor when there are so many ways and means to piggyback on the tournament’s beery goodwill? Tesco, for example, is happy to skip that bit in favour of a generic “find the footballs” competition and a reminder that you can buy the official jerseys in-store.
And so to Media and Marketing’s pre-tournament awards for best Euro 2012 media tie-ins, official and unofficial, spotted so far. Note: RTÉ Two’s Craig Doyle Live Euro 2012-themed programming was originally eligible but was later disqualified for promising to field Natasha Giggs as a guest.
Winner of the third place play-off is Superquinn, which, being Superquinn, is all subtle and refined about it and isn’t mentioning football at all in its current television campaign. It is, however, promoting a steak and wine sale, which, if the weather holds up, coincidentally lends itself to a Sunday afternoon barbecue, timed so the meat gets nice and black just as Robbie Keane shakes hands with the Croatian captain.
Runner-up is electrical retailer Currys/PC World, which made a late signing in May as an official supporter of the FAI and has managed to produce a television advertisement that is vaguely amusing, at least the first time you see it. It’s also infinitely preferable to rival flatscreen-seller Harvey Norman’s Ray Houghton-fronted ad, which signs off, wearily, with a “Go Ireland Go”.
Champion-elect is Today FM for getting its name alongside that of the FAI and 3 on the Republic of Ireland’s official 2012 anthem, The Rocky Road to Poland, which would cheer a grumpy person into sporting submission.
The lyrics belted out by the supergroup that voices the song were crowdsourced from listeners to Ray D’Arcy’s Today FM show - a simple but ingenious idea, although it wins purely for having the imagination not to feature Jedward.
