Fifa president Gianni Infantino says it doesn’t make any additional revenue from them. Stadium fans loudly boo them and TV viewers blast them on social media, but the hydration breaks introduced in this World Cup have been the bonus money spinner of the tournament.
When the final whistle blows on this edition of the World Cup, those three-minute breaks will have created more than seven hours of extra advertising time. And with 30-second ad slots during the tournament’s early games reportedly costing about $200,000 (€175,000) each, rising to $750,000 when the US are playing, the maths are making fans fearful that the commercial imperative underpinning world football means they’re here to stay.
There are strict Fifa-imposed rules around hydration advertising breaks. Twenty seconds after the referee calls for the game to stop, broadcasters are permitted to cut away from the action for their own ad break, and they must return 30 seconds before play resumes. They can fill the breaks with ads, use up only a portion of the time or stay in their studios for analysis. It depends on the broadcasters’ appetite for raking in extra revenue.
There is also a rule that the ads shown in these breaks must be from one of the official World Cup partners. That includes big-name global brands such as Adidas, Visa, Coca-Cola, Lenovo, Qatar Airways, McDonald’s, Airbnb and Unilever.
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Although Infantino says Fifa is not making any money from these spots, it’s probably not strictly accurate. The opportunity to advertise in these extra breaks would have been factored in to commercial negotiations. Fifa has confirmed a record-breaking $2.8 billion in sponsorship revenue making this the biggest sporting event in history, and the most commercially successful World Cup.
Around the world, in all big markets, broadcasters who haven’t rushed in to maximise revenue by filling hydration breaks with adverts are the exception.
In the US, Spanish language broadcaster Telemundo doesn’t show ads during the breaks, neither does the BBC, which as a public service broadcaster has no commercial advertising content. It takes the opportunity to promote its slate of programmes as well as screening a QR code to encourage viewers to buy a TV licence.
Hydration breaks should be a cash cow for ITV, the commercial station that shares UK broadcasting rights with the BBC, but rules laid out by Ofcom, the British broadcasting watchdog, mean that in reality, they aren’t.
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The station is allowed a maximum of 168 minutes of adverts a day and no more than 12 minutes of them can be shown in any single hour. So ITV has had to make a choice: have shorter advertising breaks before and after the game and during half time so as to use the water breaks. It could also borrow advertising time from other programming. But rather than engage in all that time wrangling, the station has mostly gone for the viewer-pleasing option of not showing water break ads.
RTÉ grabbed the chance for extra revenue and it caused a ripple of controversy. In the early days of the tournament one of its pundits, Richard Sadlier, was critical of that decision and voiced what many fans think when he said: “Ads during a match is wrong.”
RTÉ issued a statement saying it “has made only limited use of the advertising capacity available during these breaks and does not anticipate extensive utilisation over the course of the tournament, in order to protect the viewer experience”.
That has translated into showing ads only in the first quarter, which might appease fans who don’t want to see the momentum of the match broken up in the second half.
Fifa said it introduced hydration breaks simply as a player welfare issue, given that stadiums at this time of the year are cauldrons. That was tested in the England-Ghana game when, 22 minutes in, there was an injury stoppage, giving players ample time to hydrate – if that’s what they wanted. It wasn’t what the referee wanted and to the sound of fans booing they were urged to wait for the official hydration break, which came just minutes later. By then it was redundant, and there’s only so much water a person can drink, but there were advertisers across the world’s broadcasters waiting for that precious three minutes.
US sports commentators found little fault with the idea of breaking the games into quarters, arguing that sports fans there are used to having their viewing, for the NBA or the NFL for example, broken up. Also, as novice consumers of “soccer” they might find it more palatable if served up in bite-sized pieces.
Changes made by US broadcaster Fox last week perhaps challenge that pre-tournament take. The network had a shaky start in the opening game between Mexico and South Africa as it cut back to the stadium 10 seconds late, breaking Fifa’s advertising rules. It has been told it will not face any sanction.
But it’s the power of the fans and not rules that has made Fox take another look at its approach to water breaks. For the Mexico-South Korea match, it ran split-screen advertisements for the first time: on one side of the screen the camera stayed on the action in the stadium, on the other a commercial played.
It may have been a test, though, as days later for the US-Australia game, Fox had reverted to full-screen ads.
As the tournament heats up, cutting away from the pitch for commercials is likely to provoke increasing levels of frustration for viewers, though given how much of a cash cow hydration breaks have proven to be, it is hard to see them going away in any future Fifa-organised games.
