Aiming to cash in on the world’s most popular sporting event, Facebook is preparing to give advertisers a way to more precisely target soccer fans during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
As reported Friday in AdAge, Facebook is showing its biggest advertisers a sales deck that offers up an audience segment that has shown interest in the World Cup, the first time the social network is creating a segment for advertisers related to a television event.
We asked Facebook about the report, and a spokesperson said Facebook doesn’t comment during “such early stages of testing.” That to us, is fairly solid confirmation of the test.
AdAge reported that the “global football event” audience segment will be available in late May in advance of the tournament’s June 12 start. Marketers on Facebook can already target by interests like “soccer” or “FIFA World Cup” (a segment that contains almost 45 million people, according to Facebook’s ad tool). But the new test segment will be updated daily to also include people who are caught up in World Cup fever and have posted status updates or links to stories about the tournament.
And there’s no doubt that the World Cup audience is huge. FIFA, soccer’s international governing body that runs the tournament, said more than 3.2 billion people watched at least a minute of live coverage of the most recent quadrennial event in 2010.
For more information about the test, read the AdAge post here.
Photo via Shutterstock.
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