• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I spent the last two weeks doing some informal polling, calling and texting people I trust across the industry, asking them what they’re seeing in the market regarding spend and budget allocations.

This time, the answers were remarkably consistent. June is surprisingly soft for programmatic. You would have expected to hear things were up, given that the World Cup is in full swing, but unless you are a certified World Cup partner, it appears you’re sitting this month out, or at least taking it slow. 

The World Cup is enormous. It’s the biggest sporting event in the world, with 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities, and billions of people watching the same thing all at the same time. You would think a tentpole that size should lift the whole market, right? Maybe not.

Surprisingly, the World Cup is barely adding anything to the market at all. WARC projects the tournament will drive roughly 1.1% in incremental global ad spend, and in the U.S., the effect lands somewhere between 0.4% and 1%. That‘s smaller than the 2018 World Cup, which delivered closer to 2.8%. 

The advertisers not involved are avoiding the competition, while the ones involved are your standard big spenders who can afford to be in those partnerships.  There’s a clear gap between the haves and the have-nots pertaining to sports sponsorships.

Fox and Telemundo reportedly locked up close to a billion dollars in advertising, and they were essentially sold out months before the opening match. The money allocated to the World Cup had to come from somewhere, and it seems many brands heavied up now in the hopes of leveraging the World Cup.  They also reallocated from programmatic and digital to TV to capitalize on the Cup. 

Those brands have set budgets, so they may see a lower spend through the remainder of the year as compared to years prior. It’s possible their budgets got pulled forward, redirected, and concentrated into a handful of weeks and channels to capitalize on the event.

So what happens when the World Cup is over?  Most of the people I spoke to said the advertisers who decided to avoid these six weeks will come back, over the top, and spend to make up for lost time.  The advertisers who spent heavily during this period will experience a collective hangover and go light until Q4, when spending typically increases. 

The World Cup is not like most other sporting events.  The U.S. has the Super Bowl and March Madness.  Both are focused on the U.S. and essentially occur as shorter bursts, with March Madness lasting one month while the Super Bowl is a single day.  The World Cup is global and lasts six weeks, not including the build-up weeks preceding it.  It isn’t a tide that lifts all boats. It’s a vacuum, sucking up all available budgets and leaving little room for anyone else.

This matters for how you plan as a publisher or network. A soft June isn’t a lull, it’s a redirect. It’s focused spend from a handful of big advertisers while everyone else sits it out, and the industry hopes with crossed fingers to see the rest of advertisers come back mid-July.

The World Cup does its job. The matches are thrilling, the ads feel like they’re everywhere, and for six weeks, it genuinely seems like the whole industry is up and to the right.

Truth is, feeling and reality are different. The money didn’t grow. It moved. And when the final whistle blows in July and budgets come back, we’ll all treat the second half of the year like a fresh start -- when really, it’s just the tide flowing back in to fill the hole the vacuum left behind.