News is that Budweiser is set to broadcast an FA Cup match on its Facebook page soon. The social network appears set to offer an unprecedented opportunity to deliver unique 1:1 content to individual brand loyals without any distracting DRM issues affecting either the brand or the content owner. What chance more brands will want their content delivered this way in the future?
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Some time ago I posted about what I considered was the untapped relationship-marketing potential of Formula 1, steeped as it continued to be in the world of free-to-air television and its somewhat retro business model.

A big blow to those cobwebs came with the decision that Sky should pick up the slack left in the British broadcasting market by an impoverished BBC. It will be BSkyB and their SkyGo network who will be track-side next year for most English-speaking viewers around the world (in the UK and all those countries which used to take the BBC feed).

But more recently comes an experiment which goes closer to the heart of what is a possible way forward for all those sponsors whose tens and hundreds of millions in investment dollars ensure those little jet-like vehicles continue to go round and round Mr Ecclestone’s tarmac mulberry bushes as regularly and as quickly as they do.

Thanks to a new sponsorship agreement with the Football Association, Budweiser is set to pioneer a unique content offer to its Facebook followers. The match  between Ascot United and Wembley FC will be first live football game to be streamed on this most social of networking sites.

It is a harbinger of what every high-spending sports media partner is likely to want to deliver to its own loyal customers and brand followers in the future. Facebook appears set to offer brands a spectacular new opportunity: the capacity to deliver rich and valuable content to consumers who are already invested in their brand. Far from the retina burn and acquisition strategies of simple sponsorship and above the line advertising, this taps into longer term engagement and loyalties that could become as durable as those between viewers and broadcasters.

What chances tomorrow that the rights to rich sports content will be sold directly to brands and not to broadcasters? How much longer will they need or want mediation and the second-hand data that comes with it? I suspect that in time, a great deal of content will be served this way — one-to-one, but millions of times over.

UPDATE: Most brands have a very long way to go before a strategy like this could possibly make sense. Vodafone’s biggest fan club is in Italy but its 942000 Facebook friends are easily matched by just F1 driver Lewis Hamilton (918k). Even Ferrari’s 4.9 million seem like a fairly puny tribe compared to the following of Facebook phenomena like singer Rihanna (44 million FB “likes”). Off the F1 track, just as on it, the marketing trend-setter is Red Bull, with an impressive 22 million Facebook “likes”.