Did Your Web Site Wait Two Hours Before Showing Pictures of the FIFA World Cup Draw? If Not You Could Get A Wake-Up Call From the FIFA Police!

It’s just the opening round in the billion-dollar business that is the World Cup championships to be held in Germany, June-July, 2006. For the games themselves, if any non-licensed web site shows a picture of any World Cup game within one hour of the final whistle then FIFA could cry legal foul.

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One might think that instant picture coverage could only do FIFA good. The more publicity, the more coverage, the better. But FIFA is running its own official World Cup Internet site in conjunction with Yahoo, and if football fans around the world want to depend on the Internet for their World Cup pictures then FIFA wants them to see that information first from its own sponsored World Cup site, and not elsewhere.

And never forget that FIFA is a business, and the business numbers are huge. FIFA estimates that 30 billion people will watch the World Cup – that’s about seven times the audience for the Olympic Games. At the last World Cup in Korea in 2002 there were more than 2 billion page views to FIFA’s official World Cup Internet site.

And advertisers, like Emirates Airways that sponsored an interactive chat during Friday’s World Cup draw on the FIFA web site, want to ensure its their advertising message Internet readers see when looking for complete World Cup coverage, and not some other airline’s ad appearing on another web site.

The official FIFA site will be in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Korean. It is produced, designed, hosted and marketed jointly by FIFA and Yahoo.

FIFA’s sponsorship partners include such household names as Coca-Cola, Sony, Adidas, and MasterCard. Coca-Cola, for instance, just extended its partnership until the year 2022 at a cost of about $500 million.

Leading the fight against the two-hour picture delay is the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) headquartered in Paris. It has held several meetings with FIFA to get the picture embargo dropped, but its only success to date is getting the digital pictures ban reduced from two hours to one hour after the final whistle.

WAN recently warned that besides delaying pictures on web sites by one hour , FIFA’s credentials requirement specifies that pictures newspapers do publish are unaltered except for cropping. That means, for instance, no headline text on a photo.

WAN in a recent board resolution warned its global membership to carefully check the terms of receiving credentials. But if a news organization really wants to cover the matches does it really have any other choice but to accept what FIFA dictates? WAN called upon FIFA and other sports organizations that are considering similar restrictions to reconsider and rescind them.

But the truth is that FIFA’s actions are going to be directly affected not by such pleas but rather by concerted action by the media to demonstrate that it, too, holds some powerful cards in its hands.

For one thing, those FIFA sponsors are spending the millions of dollars that they are for the publicity their brand will receive. What if the world’s newspapers in their normal editorial activities were to give those brands very little publicity? Such a campaign occurred in the UK last year, and the national newspapers won their point.

The English Football Association (FA) announced it was restricting digital publication of match pictures by two hours and it also wanted a 7% cut of media “fantasy” football games which earn around GBP 30 million a year.

The British media then gave the FA a lesson in media power. The tabloid Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, set an editorial policy that it would not mention any football sponsor, such as Coca-Cola, within its coverage. That meant that the Coca-Cola Championships were now The Championships, that the Barclays Premiership League became known in the Sun just as the Premiership. Barclays and Coca-Cola had paid millions of pounds to the FA to have their name associated with those products, knowing full well their brand would be mentioned many times a day on sports pages, and for The Sun -- the country’s leading circulation daily -- to withdraw naming their brand caused a deep loss of value for the sponsorship.

The newspaper went even further. Picture editors were told to pick those pictures that did not show, or at least minimized, the logo of any sponsor. So if there was a picture of a player running straight towards the camera with the brand emblazoned across the jersey, or a picture of the player running to the right and the brand on the jersey could not be seen, then the latter picture got used.

No doubt FIFA sponsors are hoping, for instance, that pictures used around the world will show some part of their billboards and other advertising at the stadium venues. And while no newspaper is going to shoot itself in the foot for not printing THE picture of the match, if there is a choice between printing a picture with advertising showing and one without the advertising then …

In the UK, Data Co, the company representing the FA in the media negotiations, discussions, did not take kindly to those media tactics and threatened to sue for breach of copyright. That prompted even more media to omit sponsor names. Within three weeks a deal that had been stalemated for many weeks was done.

Truth of the matter is that FIFA is going to enjoy tremendous traffic to its web site no matter what. It’s their business decision if they really want to bite the hand that feeds on their promotional food, let alone get into a discussion about freedom of the press even if licensing rights are theirs.

But as long as there are no yellow cards, red cards or penalties for instituting such media policies then why should FIFA care?

WAN needs to use a little firepower to remind FIFA that it does represent 18,000 newspapers, 72 national newspaper associations, and newspaper executives in 102 countries. It shouldn’t take too much action for very long from such a membership to get the point across.

FIFA, WAN Meet At High Level to Resolve World Cup Coverage Delays - January 11, 2006

At least FIFA seems to understand the seriousness of the media’s reaction to coverage delays FIFA wants to institute for Internet news pictures coverage of the World Cup plus other assorted restrictions. Nothing resolved yet, but the two sides have formed a joint working group whose work will be reviewed within a month.

What seems promising as the two sides got together this week at FIFA’s Zurich headquarters was the level of representation. FIFA was represented by its president, its general secretary, its director of communications, the head of its media department, the head of legal affairs, and the head of marketing. It doesn’t get much more high-level than that!

The media’s representation was equally as impressive. The ceo and the vice president of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) were joined by the chairman of its sports rights working group who is also the director of the UK’s Newspaper Publisher Association, the President of the World Editors Forum, and the MD of the Swiss national Newspaper Association. The major international news agencies joined the negotiations represented by Pierre Louette, the new chairman and ceo of Agence France-Presse.

With representation at such high levels the human resources are certainly there to make a deal. If a deal is not forthcoming then no one from either side can say they did not understand the ramifications.