Hopefully you’ve been enjoying the first stage of the World Cup – we wouldn’t want you to have dropped the ball on that USA-England game.
Either way, we figure you must be enjoying the slew of great marketing efforts that have surrounded the games. If you haven’t seen it already, you should definitely spend three minutes watching Nike’s “Write the Future” ad, which shows the different paths the players’ lives will take depending on their successes and failures. Of course, we already called your attention to Marca’s killer calendar, which provides an enormously helpful service to fans who want to watch the games.
In fact, the only thing missing from Marca’s service is showing users where they can watch their favorite team. Fortunately, Bing is filling in the gap. Their Home Turf Finder is an excellent example of their positioning as a “decision engine,” in which they enable informed decisions rather than providing users with massive amounts of unfiltered data. In this case, Bing maps are overlaid with information about which bars (in select cities) are showing the World Cup games. Better yet, the bars are filtered by their national allegiances, so that fans of a particular country can watch with their peers instead of their mortal enemies (that’s right, we know all about your longstanding feud with Honduras).
While this is an excellent application of Concierge Culture, it’s an even smarter example of how our Hometown’s Hero trend enables brands to make deep, meaningful connections with consumers on a local level. For anyone living in these cities, Bing is providing extremely valuable recommendations by collecting specific local knowledge and filtering it in a useful manner. It’s the kind of targeted content that encourages discovery, as consumers may not even realize that bars in their vicinity have a particular affiliation for certain teams. In the long run, Bing is changing consumer expectations of a particular industry (in this case, search) by providing a more personalized, relevant solution for the consumers. Google shouldn’t be the only one taking note.
