EuroPundit 2016 app provides a smart alternative to expensive official UEFA sponsorship packages by putting brands at the heart of fan competition.

Saturday’s European Championship draw in Paris has kick started the debate among football fans around the world about what’s going to happen at next summer’s finals in France. This is a conversation that brands interested in football audiences would love to participate in and now they can thanks to the new EuroPundit app by social games designer Sporting Mouth, which will launch next year.

Rather than fight over one of the astronomically expensive official UEFA Euro 16 promotional deals, brands can now take a truly different approach by sponsoring an app that makes it easy for fans to pit their knowledge against their friends, challenge each other’s predictions, swap banter, make fun wagers between themselves and win prizes.

“EuroPundit provides a wonderful opportunity for brands to take part in Euro 2016 and get closer to the people whose opinions about the tournament count just as much as professional pundits – the fans!” said Sporting Mouth chairman and former ad agency boss, John Owrid, whose company clashed with FIFA in the run up to the 2014 World Cup for offering alternative innovative sponsorship opportunities.

“It’s patently absurd that you can copyright the words World Cup, which we used in our app, but that’s what FIFA has been able to do,” explained Owrid, who believes official tournament sponsorship opportunities lack creativity and cut through.

“Our aim is to help brands to engage with fans on their terms during major tournaments, tapping into the customs and nuances of fan culture in a way that is often by-passed by traditional sports marketing initiatives. You’d expect the collective marketing output for the Euros and the World Cup to dazzle with diversity. Instead, you get a month of marketing similarity that even the Christmas season would struggle to beat. We want to change that for Euro 2016, which will stoke up British fan rivalry to fever pitch with three home nations and Ireland being involved for the first time – and now with England and Wales fighting it out in the same group!”

EuroPundit 2016 is a multi-platform mobile app that encourages fans to do battle with each other by predicting the outcomes of Euro 2016 matches, make social wagers with one another and win prizes for being the top pundit. The EuroPundit App will be released in the run up to the European Championships which kicks off in France on 10 June next year.

Originally posted TheMarketingBlog.co.uk 15 December 2015