Carling Misses Opportunity With Wembley Signboards

Instead of providing a match report about the Carling Cup Final (great game, congratulations United on the win), I want to write about a different but related topic and that is the advertising boards sprinkled around Wembley which contained messages from supporters from both clubs Sunday.

You may have seen some of them in between the Carling boards. My favorites were:

• “Martin Give Us A Wave,” and
• “My Parrot Is A Villa Fan,”

But there were a few cheesy ones, to name just a few, such as:

• “The Lion Is In You Today,”
• “Greatness Becomes United,” and
• “Oh You Glorious Lions.”

While watching the game, I couldn’t stop myself from peeking to see what the next message would say. But then it made be wonder, with the game being shown to such a massive worldwide TV audience, whether the opportunity were wasted. I mean instead of displaying corny messages such as “Shoot Shoot Shoot” (which was an actual message on the signboard), why not display some messages for charities instead? Why not communicate messages that would actually do some good and encourage some TV viewers to take action and donate to worthwhile charities? And why not use a global language we all would understand — a web URL?

Here are a few ideas:

• bit.ly/help-haiti
• bit.ly/help-chile
• bit.ly/help-cure-aids
• bit.ly/donate-to-charity

Carling, the sponsors of the Cup, will be making a donation of up to £10,000 to charity because of the signboards. But with such a massive worldwide TV audience, I feel that Carling could have generated much more for charity just by re-thinking how the signboards were used. Plus, by using Bit.ly, they could have tracked how many people visited the pages. And, if they were smart, they could have redirected people to charity sites where they could have tracked how much money was earned for the charities, and then generated a press release to share the good news.

And what a better lasting memory that would have been than “My Parrot Is A Villa Fan.”