FRANKFURT — Nike’s latest World Cup ad, featuring Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo, was seen by 78 million people in four days. Then it went to television.
Though the vast majority of fans will still watch World Cup matches on TV, the marketing battle has gone online. Nike’s four-minute spot was released on YouTube and Facebook during an April 25 event in Madrid showcasing the shoemaker’s latest cleat. Within hours, Ronaldo — the most popular sports star on Twitter — had sent it to his 26 million followers. A shorter TV version wasn’t broadcast until April 29.
‘‘I’m pretty sure what I launched today will be around the world in a second,’’ Nike’s brand president Trevor Edwards said at the Madrid event. ‘‘We’re almost at a point where it’s hard to calculate what is on television versus what’s on the Web.’’
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Nike says its TV ad buying during the World Cup is declining as it increasingly uses Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to reach fans in a battle with Adidas for supremacy in the global soccer-products market, which NPD Group estimates will grow by 8 percent this year to about $17 billion.
Adidas will spend more on Internet promotions than on television for this year’s World Cup: About half of its media expenditure for the tournament will go online, versus a fifth at the 2010 event in South Africa, CEO Herbert Hainer said. Neither Adidas nor Nike would reveal how much they spend on soccer advertising.
The current campaign, Adidas’ biggest ever, ‘‘will be heavily supported by social media,’’ Hainer said at the company’s headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany. ‘‘It makes us absolutely fresh and new.’’
Though there are no statistics that break out World Cup ad outlays, online promotions are quickly catching TV in global expenditures. Corporations will spend about $68.5 billion on TV this year and $56 billion online, according to researcher eMarketer. In 2010, the year the World Cup was in South Africa, television advertising was more than double that of online, eMarketer reports.
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The monthlong World Cup is the planet’s most-watched sporting event — largely on television. About 400 million people are expected to see the contest’s final match on July 13, according to Futures Sport + Entertainment, a London media-analysis firm.
The rise of smartphones is changing how fans watch matches.
‘‘Mobile uploads will be going crazy’’ at the World Cup, said Suzie Reider, a managing director at Google’s YouTube unit.