• by Sameer Deen , Columnist, June 16, 2016

Last week, soccer fans around the world cheered on their favorite North and South American teams as Copa America Centenario kicked off in Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium. Played for the first time ever in the United States, the centennial anniversary edition of Copa America is not only the biggest soccer event happening this year—it’s one of the biggest soccer events to hit the country in more than two decades.

U.S. soccer fans have taken note. So far, telecasts of this historic tournament are outperforming the 2014 World Cup group stage ratings, up +7% among Total Viewers and +11% among Adults 18-49. 

The recent World Cup set the bar for social media engagement around sporting events, with a record 389,000 messages-per-minute recorded on Twitter, surpassing the previous record set by the NFL around Super Bowl XLVIII. Copa America Centenario on our broadcast network alone is already showing promising results not only ratings wise but on the social front ranking as the No. 2 most social primetime sporting event across all English and Spanish-language broadcast networks through the first five days of the tournament, beating everything except the 2016 NBA finals, according to Nielsen. 

Driving buzz and awareness across platforms are global soccer superstars like Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Colombia’s James Rodriguez, and Mexico’s Chicharito. The top 10 most followed Copa America players on social are garnering a combined following of more than half a billion across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. 

These stars present a tremendous opportunity to delve into best practices for the delivery and monetization of multichannel sports entertainment content, in order to guide and inform how brands, media channels and social platforms can work in concert to maximize their efforts around global events like the upcoming Olympics and future World Cups. 

Brand sponsors of the Copa America Centenario are banking on this. For them, it’s not just about TV and digital advertising engagements; it’s also an opportunity for them to offer in-person consumer experiences in major markets. They want to turn all these eyeballs following the athletes into fans of their products. They know the star power of the biggest players on social can provide inroads they need to move product with the fans who follow them. 

Digital integrations for brands in live sporting events are proving to be essential — from branded and unbranded social integrations to opportunities to own second-screen experiences. In fact, Copa America Centenario content also features six-second pre-roll ads on Twitter, which according to the platform, is their largest video distribution and ad deal to date. Budweiser, whose parent company Anheuser-Busch is a sponsor of the games, teamed up with Copa America on a Budweiser “Man of the Match” campaign that enables fans to vote for the player who they think performed the best after each match, encouraging social engagement with the hashtag #BudMOTM.   

Events like Copa America Centenario continue to prove that large tent-pole events centered on the audience’s passion points provide meaningful opportunities for brands to reach their growth consumers at scale across a range of platforms and touch points. As the highly anticipated event is underway, fans all over the world are tuning in to watch the matches and engaging with their favorite stars on social media. With 32 matches leading up to the final on June 26, this is an exciting time for the growing soccer fan base in the United States, and for the brands looking to engage them.