Add up the potential TV audience of the football leagues and competitions that TAG Heuer has partnered with over the past twelve months and you get a figure of around 8.4 billion, which is a billion more than the world’s population! This is because the figures are potential audiences, of course, and there are overlaps. Even with Jean-Claude Biver’s marketing genius, TAG Heuer will only ever be able to expose itself to a maximum of 7.4 billion people on Earth. Although if ever we discovered signs of extraterrestrial life, I’m sure that Mr. Biver would make sure that the first watch brand they heard of would be TAG Heuer.
It all started on 1st August 2015 when the La Chaux-de-Fonds based brand became the official timekeeper of the German Bundesliga, which has the largest global TV audience of any football league, estimated at around 4.7 billion. For most watch brands, that alone would be quite a coup, but for TAG Heuer it was just the start of an all-out offensive to capture the TV screens of football fans across most of the major continents (see the infographic below). In February the brand became a partner of Major League Soccer in the United States, which has a potential audience of over 100 million in the country on just one channel. Just over a week later came the announcement that TAG Heuer was the new official timekeeper of China’s Super League (potential audience: 400 million). Before the month was out, the brand had also become the partner of the “Socceroos”, the Australian national football team. In April, TAG Heuer secured another continent’s worth of viewers as the official timekeeper of the Copa America (potential audience: 100 million) and, less than a week later, announced that it had become the first ever official timekeeper of England’s Premier League, which is broadcast to an audience of over 3 billion people worldwide.
Over the summer, TAG Heuer added another 180 million potential customers when it became the official timekeeper of Spain’s La Liga on 13th July. Less than two weeks later it was gracing the premium advertising space at Old Trafford as the new official timekeeper of Manchester United, one of the world’s most marketable football properties with a huge worldwide following. I was lucky enough to attend the Manchester Derby earlier this season (Manchester United versus Manchester City at Old Trafford) and saw first-hand fans flying in from Geneva and back out to Amsterdam and on to destinations around Europe. In early September, TAG Heuer announced that it was the official timekeeper of the Asian Cup 2019 and the Asian Qualifiers for the 2018 FIFA World Cup (one of the few football tournaments not sponsored by TAG Heuer but by sister brand Hublot).
With three months left in the year there is still time for TAG Heuer to announce a partnership in Africa to reach the continent’s 1.2 billion people and make its football partnerships truly global.
