Very much my (World) cup o' tea

Happy Tuesday, one and all. Here in Minneapolis, it's finally primo bike riding weather, which means I've cracked out Old Faithful (my much abused mountain bike) and am using it for all sorts of errands, business and otherwise. Why drive to the post office when I can bike? Why drive to work in the morning when I can bike? (Caveat: it's not as easy to bring a to-go coffee mug on a bike as it is in the car. Consider yourselves warned ... learn from my mistakes.)

Spring is here at last — which means summer is just around the corner. (Hey, a girl can hope.) And if I await this summer even more eagerly than most, well, there's a very good reason: the World Cup. Having grown up overseas, soccer isn't just an idle amusement for me ... it's a passion. (Hey, with players like this, how can one help but feel passionately about the sport?!)

But I'm not the only one taking note. This year's World Cup in South Africa is going to be the subject of ostensibly the most sweeping cross-platform media research ever. ESPN, in partnership with the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative (shout-out to my alma mater!) and a number of national media research agencies, plans to track media consumption of all things relating to the World Cup, laying the foundation for one heck of a bargaining chip in structuring future media deals with advertisers.

According to Ad Age, the ESPN initiative includes a number of industry firsts, including the first commercial use of an electronic mobile panel that tracks mobile media usage, as well as the use of iPhones as "electronic diaries of media consumption."

Huh. Sounds like a pretty sweet gig to me. What I wouldn't give to be the one monitoring the results! Having to watch hours and hours of soccer coverage .... that, truly, would be a labor of love. It'll be interesting to see what ESPN discovers, particularly in terms of smartphone usage and the interactive components of World Cup coverage. Perhaps even more interesting will be the subsequent negotiations with major advertisers, as media buys take on new, cross-platform relevance.

In any case, I'll be doing my own, slightly-less-formal, er, "research", as the games commence.