Mario Neto: I wanna bring in some stats here, but I want to talk about marketing during these big events. The World Cup is the biggest around the globe — it reaches about 5 billion people in the world. It’s insane. In 2026, it’s expected that the World Cup will add 10 billion dollars in ad spend globally. It generated almost 2 billion in revenue for FIFA in the 2022 World Cup, so you can only imagine how much that’s gonna be this year. But how would that translate to B2B SaaS? How do you see companies maybe leveraging this event, this kind of ad spend, this kind of visibility, into their campaigns, into their strategies? How can they leverage the World Cup in order to maybe connect to these five billion people around the globe?
Antoine Vial: Yeah, I mean I think these numbers are staggering — they’re beyond what one can really grasp in terms of order of magnitude. But before we link it back to B2B SaaS, I think any company has an opportunity to leverage the event in order to gain brand awareness, and potentially get exposure to whatever they’re trying to sell. My favorite example, and probably one of the best examples out there, is Nike. And we’re not talking about the small kid around the corner — we’re talking about Nike. For every single World Cup, at least in my opinion, they always come up with the best commercial ever. For the longest time they had these amazing videos where it was just a commercial with all the star players passing the ball to each other — I think it’s the 2006 World Cup, with Ronaldinho, Kaká, I don’t know, all the biggest players at the time just passing the ball to each other, going through different countries, and then, of course, it’s a Nike commercial, and it ends with Ronaldinho scoring a crazy shot, and you see the line of the shoe he was wearing at the time — the Tiempo, I think, the R10.
But anyway, they continued to do that, and to this day I think they master the art of leveraging the fact that it’s an athletic event, and therefore there are sports superstars — in this case soccer superstars — who are going to be wearing their gear, and kids and adults around the globe aspire to be these athletes, so they want to wear the same gear, or the gear their national team is wearing. So the exposure — Nike does it better than anyone. They show, hey, we’re here, and they give you a feeling — it’s almost emotional, it’s emotionally tied to what people are watching and the event that’s happening, and that’s why they win.
They win in exposure and brand awareness in a way that I think is almost a textbook use case of how you can leverage it. Now for B2B SaaS, it’s a bit more complex, because it’s not cheap to market and do marketing for these kinds of global events, and you’d want to make sure you target the right audience. But if we think about what’s currently happening with AI, I can imagine a commercial with Claude or with ChatGPT that would drastically expand the reach to an audience that could be a good target audience. It’s really hard to filter the target audience on TV, the way you would with very specific ads — the retargeting ads we’re used to running on website traffic, or online events you’ve hosted, and all these things. But I think that’s the opportunity — it’s an opportunity for big enough players who can afford millions or billions of views that aren’t necessarily their target audience, just because they’re trying to expand their brand’s reach and plant a seed for later on. It’s like when you drive on the highway and there’s a massive sign for Audi or whatever — these companies have made the bet that enough people, including their target audience, are going to pass in front of it, and they’re okay spending a lot of money on eyes that aren’t necessarily going to convert.
But I’m sure there are plenty of use cases that can be more specific and valuable for B2B SaaS. You need to be relevant — you can’t force it if it’s not the right event, even if you’re going to get millions of eyes on what you push. You just need to be relevant. I worked with a company called Sure People for a little bit, which is a personality assessment company for B2B SaaS, but they have an entire branch for personality assessment for sports teams — here it might be the right time, because it’s really relevant to their target audience and to the event. So companies like this can take advantage of it. Also, in sports, we always have a lot of data — so many data points captured, whether for predictions of who’s going to win, or if you have a SaaS company that sells, I don’t know, predictions on which team is going to win, for betting, or which player is going to be scoring, or whatever it is.
I’m also thinking about a company called PFF, which sells data points to professional athletes and professional athletic teams, more on the American football and baseball side, but they’re able to capture an enormous amount of data from events, and they could probably also take advantage to expand into soccer, because now that event is linked to soccer. So I’m thinking about these kinds of use cases as good examples, because they’re relevant — if you tie relevancy and emotion together, you have a beautiful cocktail, and potentially a great output. But if you’re not relevant, regardless of how good your commercials are or how much time you put into them, I don’t think it’s going to work.
Mario Neto: Yeah, a hundred percent. But you also need to prepare for it, because there’s also an expectation of an increase of about fifteen percent in cost per click, in CPMs, in all the advertising costs. So you need to be prepared, because since people are going to be investing more, prices are going to go up, bids are going to go up. So even if you’re not going to run a campaign, you need to be aware of those numbers. If you keep your budget the way it is, you might see a drop in the number of leads, in the number of conversions you get from your campaigns. You’ve got to be prepared, and not necessarily blame the team and say, hey, what’s happening here — there’s a World Cup happening, there’s a major event that every single company is pouring money into. So either way, even if you don’t run a campaign, it impacts you. So it’s good to be aware, good to be on top of it, and watch the trends and see what’s happening.
Antoine Vial: Yeah, and take advantage of the seasonality too, to be relevant, if you know your target audience has some sort of interest in these kinds of events — even though your tool has nothing to do with it. Just take advantage of, I don’t know, funny memes you can pull from something that happens, or a crazy score — just relevancy. Just take advantage of the seasonality of these kinds of events, which happen once every four years, to really leverage it in a way that makes sense and is relevant, and that shows you’re living with your times and not just completely ignoring that major event.