News Broadcasting
Fifa World Cup to kick in €1.1 billion in profits
MUMBAI: The Fifa World Cup, which kicks off in Germany next week, is on course for profits of €1.1 billion. The estimated €1billion cost of staging the event is far outweighed by revenues from the sale of media rights, sponsorship, merchandise and tickets.
This information is contained in Sportcal.com’s newly-published World Cup 2006: The Commercial Report. Fifa, soccer’s world governing body, told the authors of the report that the World Cup would generate €1.9 billion in marketing revenue, with the sale of television and new media rights raising €1.2 billion and the remaining €700 million deriving from other sources such as sponsorship and hospitality.
The sponsorship figure includes €60 million raised by the local organising committee. The ticketing operation, which is also being handled by the organising committee, should bring in a further €200 million.
The figures are a feather in the cap of Fifa Marketing, the governing body’s commercial arm responsible for marketing sponsorship of Fifa and the World Cup, and of Infront Sports and Media, the Switzerland-based sports agency that marketed the media rights for the competition. Infront stands to benefit directly from its success, with profits over and above a guaranteed figure to be shared equally with Fifa. The report estimates that the guarantee was exceeded by between €200 million and €300 million for the 2002 and 2006 competitions combined.
Fifa’s anticipated media rights revenues of €1.2 billion for the 2006 World Cup represent a 34-per-cent increase on the media rights revenues it realised at the 2002 World Cup, held in Japan and South Korea, a less favourable time zone than Germany’s for most of soccer’s top television markets.
The UK’s BBC and ITV are among the largest contributors to overall 2006 World Cup revenues, jointly paying £105 million for the rights for the event. The largest single contribution to 2006 World Cup revenues is coming from ARD and ZDF, the German public-service broadcasters, which jointly agreed to pay €170 million for the television rights to screen the event.
This figure Sportcal.com states was formerly eclipsed by a fee estimated at €360 million that TV Globo, the Brazilian broadcaster, undertook to pay for the rights for both the 2002 and 2006 tournaments. However, the deal was renegotiated in 2004, after a heavy recession in Latin America, with the result that TV Globo is estimated to be paying just €65 million for the rights for this year’s tournament. Fifa expects that television sales from the European market alone for the 2010 tournament would be worth €1 billion, more than double the fees paid by European broadcasters for this year’s World Cup.
For the first time, sales of new media rights this year are set to make a significant contribution to overall revenues for this year’s World Cup. Fifa estimates, new media to bring in revenues of €120 million for the 2006 World Cup.
Meanwhile, sponsorship revenues for this year’s competition include payments of between €25 million and €40 million each from 15 ‘official partners,’ 11 of which had also sponsored the 2002 tournament.
From the next World Cup onwards, Fifa is restructuring its sponsorship programme, reducing the number of official partners to just six (which will, however, each pay a considerably higher fee) in response to concerns over sponsorship ‘clutter.’
In Sportcal.com’s report Phillips, the Dutch electronics giant, cites sponsorship ‘clutter’ as one of its reasons for ending its sponsorship after this summer’s competition after a 20-year relationship with the World Cup.
In a conference address last month, Philips’ head of sponsorship Andy Knee had issued a warning to Fifa and soccer generally not to take sponsors for granted. He said, “Partnership is a word used regularly but we are looking for a two-way partnership and there remains a mentality in football just to take the money. I expect someone to understand my business and my products, and that would make me spend more money.”
Six local ‘suppliers,’ signed up by the organising committee, which are paying an average of €10 million each to be associated with the event.
Fifa points out that its profits from the World Cup go towards funding its many other activities over the four-year cycle between World Cups, including less lucrative competitions such as junior and women’s World Cups and the quadrennial Confederations Cup between continental national teams champions. Between 2007 and 2010, Fifa will stage 22 such competitions, including the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
News Broadcasting
CNN-News18 to air live counting day coverage for five state election results on May 4
The channel is rolling out its biggest election coverage machinery yet for results day on 4th May
NOIDA: The votes have been cast. Now comes the reckoning. CNN-News18 is pulling out all the stops for results day on 4th May, when counting begins across five battleground states — West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry — in what promises to be one of the most closely watched electoral verdicts in recent memory.
The channel’s coverage, titled Battle for the States: The Verdict, kicks off at 7am and runs through the day across linear TV, connected television and YouTube. It is the culmination of CNN-News18’s multi-format editorial initiative, Battle for the States, which has tracked the polls from the beginning under the theme Road to Power.
At the operational heart of the coverage will be the Live Results Hub, the channel’s central command centre built to collate, verify and process real-time data flowing in from reporters stationed at counting centres across constituencies. The hub combines newsroom intelligence, analytics and on-the-ground reporting to deliver what the channel promises will be the fastest and most accurate results coverage in English news.
Leading the on-air charge will be primetime anchors Rahul Shivshankar, Anand Narasimhan, Aman Sharma, Nabila Jamal and Shivani Gupta. They will be joined by a wide panel of commentators including author Chetan Bhagat; GVL Narasimha Rao, senior leader of the BJP; Smita Prakash, editor of ANI; activist Saira Shah Halim; political analyst Sumanth C Raman; Abhijit Iyer Mitra, senior fellow at IPCS; Amitabh Tiwari, founder of VoteVibe; columnist Abhijit Majumdar; Nalin Mehta, managing editor of MoneyControl; political analyst Tehseen Poonawalla; senior journalist Subir Bhaumik; and political analyst Manojit Mandal.
Shivshankar, who serves as editorial affairs director at CNN-News18, set out the stakes plainly. “Counting day is one of the most watched events in the electoral cycle, where speed and credibility are tested in real time,” he said. “Battle for the States: The Verdict is built on that promise, combining ground reporting, sharp analysis and cutting-edge election technology to give viewers the clearest and fastest route to the verdict. On May 4, CNN-News18 will once again be the nation’s most trusted channel to witness democracy in action.”
Smriti Mehra, chief executive of English and Business News at Network18, framed the coverage in broader terms. “Elections are defining national events, and audiences turn to brands they trust in moments that matter,” she said. “CNN-News18 has consistently led from the front in every election coverage, and this special programming reflects the scale of our ambition and editorial strength.”
The channel has form here. It claims to have been India’s most preferred English news destination for election results for the past 20 years, covering everything from the 2024 general elections to the Delhi, Maharashtra, Bihar and BMC polls on the back of what it calls an “Always First, Always Right” record. Five states, one day, and a nation waiting for answers. The clock starts at 7am on 4th May.
