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Football, or soccer as we know it, has a passionate following around the world ranging from shirtless men with painted faces cheering in UK stadiums to Indian school children kicking a ball down the street.

The Football App has raised $13 million to capitalize on this fervor.  Many football fans are frankly, obsessed, and this product lets them indulge their passion whenever they want.

The app aggregates data, media content, and services like ticketing from various sources and merges them into a ‘one stop shop’ for fans. Claiming to be ‘the world’s leading mobile football community,’ the company has over 3.5 million monthly and up to 1.5 million daily active users who use the app to access live tickers, rankings, team statistics, news etc… about their favorite teams.

The Football App already has a major audience in Europe, and said up to one hundred thousand new users join a day across 155 markets. This financing, led by Earlybird Ventures, will help the company scale to accommodate this growth, especially with the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Funds will also be used to add in new social features and release complementary products “around the greatest sport in the world.”

Downloading the app is free on iTunes, Google Play, and Windows store. The content covers over 100 leagues in 6 languages and the company hopes to expand this to 400 leagues and 40 language by the end of the year.

Growth of this speed and magnitude, as well as soaring rates of user engagement, is something every entrepreneur (and their investors) lust over. There are vast resources, companies, and products dedicated to achieving this type of traction. Marketing schemes, advertising campaigns, search engine optimization, social media analytics, referrals, and media attention, it seems, pale in comparison to sheer, simple love of the game.

Photo Credit: Ronnie Macdonald/Flickr

Filed under: Deals, Mobile

U.S. video game retail sales fell 20 percent in July, with total industry sales falling to $548.4 million from $686.3 million a year ago, according to consumer market research firm NPD Group. This reflects the continuing trend of gaming growth as a business, the number of games sold through physical stores is falling.

Hardware sales are also down, with a 32 percent decline from last year’s $221.4 million to $150.7 million. Video game software sales are down 23 percent, to $260.7 million from $338.5 million a year ago. Only Nintendo’s handheld consoles showed any positive movement.

“Of the hardware platforms that were on the market last July, only one, the 3DS, realized a unit sales increase over last year,” said Anita Frazier, industry analyst, The NPD Group. “Both the DS and the 3DS, however, realized a month-over-month unit sales increase over June 2012 while the other platforms declined.”

The poor overall performance in July was a little better than in June, when sales fell 29 percent, and May, when sales fell 28 percent when compared to a year ago. NPD says that the total consumer spending on games — when adding digital sales and used games, rentals, and subscriptions — was more like $1.36 billion in the month of June, compared to $1.17 billion in May.

According the NPD Group, total consumer spending on used and rental games reached $386 million, and content in digital format, including full games, add-on content downloads, subscriptions, mobile games and social network games, generated $1.47 billion.

“In the second quarter of this year, sales of content in a digital format have grown 17 percent over Q2 2011,” said Frazier. “While this growth is in stark contrast to the declines in new physical software and hardware sales, the size of digital sales is not quite large enough to offset these declines, leading to an overall drop in consumer spending in Q2 by 16 percent.”

NPD is working with video game research company EEDAR to try to come up with more accurate numbers for global digital and physical game sales worldwide.

The top game of July is NCAA Football 13 (pictured at top) for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Warner Bros.’s Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, available for multiple platforms, is the No. 2-selling game of the month, down from its top spot last month in June. The third-best seller is The Amazing Spider-Man from Activision Blizzard, also for multiple platforms, up from last month’s 10th spot.

The rest of the top 10 sellers in order are Just Dance 3 from Ubisoft, Batman Arkham City from Warner Bros., Call of Duty: Black Ops from Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, NBA 2K12 from Take-Two Interactive, Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Dead Island from publisher Deep Silver.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

Usually when I want to watch the goofy antics of a middle-aged guy with weird fake facial hair wearing an ugly three-piece suit, I take a look in the mirror. David & Goliath saves me the trouble with a trio of 30-second spots touting NFL Thursday Night Football and the NFL.com Fantasy Football competition. This spokes-dude is equal parts quirky and annoying, and to ratchet up the quirkiness factor even more, he's shown in settings not normally associated with football: a wheat field, a downtown rooftop and a bucolic mountain clearing (with sheep). To his credit, he works the self-consciously wacky material hard, modulating his voice in oddball ways, gesturing with a blue foam novelty hand and kicking a cheerleader's pom pom for a field goal as he struggles to inject humor into the proceedings and convince viewers that these NFL offerings are "serious fun." Check out two more spots after the jump.

PrePlay, a New York-based predictive sports game startup, has raised $3.1 million in Series A funding. The company says it will use the funding to expand its staff and develop new apps for baseball and “other entertainment related content.”

The funding round was led by social media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, RSE Ventures’ CEO Matt Higgins, and other angel investors, who’s names have not yet been released. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Users compete in social games on PrePlay to predict the outcomes of live TV shows. The company, formed in April 2010, currently has two titles: PrePlay Football and Molson Canadian NHL PrePlay, which was licensed by the NHL and (obviously) sponsored by Molson. As founder and CEO Andrew Daines said, the games are based on “ the most interesting question in the world–what’s going to happen next.”

“This funding will allow us to continue to add to our rock star team and release titles for a greater variety of sports, media and entertainment content in the not-so-distant future,” Daines said in a press release.

PrePlay’s blog touts impressive statistics from fan usage during the NHL Stanley Cup Finals. Posting 187,508 real time predictions throughout the playoffs, users attempted to predict who would win games and series and which players would be score clutch goals. However, they do not limit themselves to sports, as their site says they can expand their platform to other shows.

PrePlay representatives were not immediately available for comment.

With the Wimbledon final looming on Sunday, it feels like a good time to look at some classic tennis ads. Unruly Media has a nice list of the most-shared tennis spots of all time. We'll look at the top 15 at the link below. Many of them are faux stunt footage—goading the viewer into wondering whether some impossible trick shots are real or not. Others are straightforward action montages that sports marketers love so much. It is perhaps a little embarrassing for tennis that the No. 1 spot on the list isn't a tennis spot at all—it's for Nike Football (the European kind), with Rafael Nadal squaring off against Cristiano Ronaldo on a tennis court. Despite our lingering concerns about his skills as a pitchman, Roger Federer is the undisputed champion of this list, followed by Novak Djokovic and Nadal in about equal measure. It's a shame hardly any women are represented, although Maria Sharapova does have a cameo in one of the Head Tennis spots. See the full batch at this link:

Video Gallery: The Most-Viral Tennis Ads Ever

The auction house Sotheby’s is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages – stamped and signed by Jobs himself – describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says “All-One Farm Design” and features a Buddhist mantra, “gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl.” As you do.

If you’re thinking of picking this up you’d best have about $10,000 to $15,000 handy – although bidding could get fierce. Quoth MacWorld:

If you’re really feeling spendy, you can plop down $180,000 on an original Apple I circuit board, presumably in mint condition. Get cracking and don’t forget: Sabbe satta sukhi hontu.

Click to view slideshow.

Viral Friday is de wekelijkse rubriek op Marketingfacts in samenwerking met SocialMedia8, waarin de beste virals van de afgelopen week worden belicht. Met deze week campagnes van Nike Football, Pepsi Max & The Leap. Heb je een tip? Stuur ‘m op! Lees meer over: Week 21/2012 Viral Friday: Nike Football, Pepsi Max & The Leap.

‘Don’t tell me I have potential’ is de gedachte achter de nieuwe ‘My Time is Now’-campagne van Nike Football. Binnen de campagne worden ze gezien als hongerige atleten die door willen breken in de grote wedstrijden.

Passionate people all have something that they enjoy looking forward to.  Football fans love Super Bowl Sunday, music lovers are already planning for next year’s Coachella Festival and social media marketers can’t wait to read the annual Social Media Industry Report.  

The Social Media Examiner published the 2012 Social Media Industry Report on April 3, 2012.  This year’s report surveyed over 3800 marketers of all ages employed in a variety of different industries including agencies, small businesses and B2B/B2C companies.  

Didn’t catch the report?  Here’s what you missed:

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Electronic Arts said today that its critical online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, had 1.3 million active subscribers in the fourth-fiscal quarter ended March 31.

The video game giant announced the news as part of its quarter and year-end fiscal report after the close of trading on the stock market today.

According to the accompanying press release, fiscal Q4 full-game downloads were up 76 percent year-over-year, contributing $60 million in the quarter, driven in part by Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA also plans to release two new content packs – Legacy and Allies – both becoming available in fiscal Q1 of this year.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) is a well-funded massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with full voice-acted cutscenes and high production values. It was created as a competitor to Activision Bizzard’s venerable MMO, World Of Warcraft, the online game to beat.

Our own reviewer, Heinrich Lenhardt, gave SWTOR high marks, citing the storytelling, mutliple classes, and a game that’s fun to play as a singleplayer as well as with others.

Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, EA is a publisher and developer of video games for consoles, computers, and mobile devices. Some of their high-profile titles include The Sims, Madden NFL Football, FIFA Soccer, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect.

EA’s number of active subscribers is consistent with EA’s original goal. It is down from 1.7 million subscribers in the previous quarter (Star Wars launched on Dec. 20). But EA said that it has a stable number of subscribers now after the initial casual players cycled through the game. So far, 2.4 million units have sold through at retail.

In a conference call with analysts, EA chief executive John Riccitiello said that Star Wars is an important title, but not as important as EA’s top five properties, which include Medal of Honor, SimCity, The Sims, Battlefield, and Madden NFL Football. He said the Star Wars title is more important to revenues than Tiger Woods PGA Golf. Riccitiello said that investors have been very focused on Star Wars.

Frank Gibeau, another top executive at EA, said that no one is directly competing with EA’s Star Wars title in the massively multiplayer online space, and no one else has the Star Wars brand behind it.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat