World Cup Feature: It's a Knockout

Just as you thought the World Cup was 'so last week' here we go again with (among other things) call centre productivity; social media match predictions; and the disturbing prospect of Diego Maradona running round Buenos Aires naked.

So, that's the Groups just about done - now for the real questions to be asked. We haven't seen a great deal of qual yet, and apart from Portugal-North Korea not a great deal of quant either. Facts, figures and alarming rumours however abound - here's a digest from our Features Editor Teresa Lynch.


Call Centres

As Jan Shury of IFF pointed out in an article before the kick-off, major sporting events can have a negative impact on productivity. In his article he warned against trying to reach the key demographic for a football match during the World Cup. What he didn't mention was the potentially negative effect of the country coming to a standstill for one match.

According to www.callcentreclinic.com on Thursday, 'England's call centres were struck by steep decline in call traffic yesterday afternoon, as the country stood still to watch England's win against Slovenia. In a 500-seat call centre paying staff an average hourly wage of £6.88, two idle hours equates to £5,800 in wasted resource.' So, sick as a parrot.

However for Efisio Mele, Head of Telephone Operations at Kudos Research, Wednesday was more a game of two halves: 'some interviewers were watching the game online at their desk but most stopped and went to the pub, however when the interviewers came back they had their most productive day of the week so far'. Furthermore he thinks maybe Americans really do watch football: 'What I found more surprising was that it was not very productive in the USA, but I am not 100% sure if respondents were surprised to get a call from London during the England game or because we called them during the USA vs Algeria'. He's Italian, so don't laugh.


Bigger than Obama

These days one doesn't really have to leave one's desk. Early figures from the BBC put the peak concurrent streams watching the match on the Corp's web site at 800,000. And it held! The BBC had 'set aside as much capacity' as it could in order not to be in the same position as ITV who were accused of seizing up during England's first match. As universally predicted, not least by us, this is going to be the global digital breakthrough event and these finals have already broken all records: on the first day of the competition global web traffic exceeded that when Obama won the US presidential election.


Who likes this?

Soon, of course, we won't need to conduct interviews at all since we will be able to answer any question on any subject by interrogating social media. Scott Moir of SEO company IRBTRAX confidently predicted that England would beat Slovenia based only on the number of FaceBook fans the respective teams had following them. The England team had 358,000 fans and the Slovenian team 39,000, so no contest really. [Presumably, then, Algeria also has 358,000?]. MrWeb checked the figures in order to predict the England v Germany match on Sunday and England are now up to 380,000 with the Germans lagging some way behind with 128,000. Game on.


And Diego...

...has promised to run round Buenos Aires naked if Argentina win the cup, and in a fine show of solidarity with the Argentine people, Pepsi have promised to go a week without branding on their bottles if Diego does his streak. Their advertising shows a completely bare bottle with a label reading 'SI EL DT SE DESNUDA, NOSOTROS TAMBIEN', translated 'If the coach goes naked, we will too'.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.