World Cup Mobile: iPundit iPhone app from Thomson Sport

Thomson Sport has released a new iPhone app for the World Cup that combines footie, social networking and gaming. The iPundit app lets you predict the results for all upcoming matches, and score points depending on how accurate you are. The gaming and social networking comes in when you can compare scores with your friends, and share opinions with any iPundit user.

What’s the app?

iPundit is based around an interactive wall-chart with every World Cup match scheduled on it. iPundit users can predict the scores of the matches – you get 7 points for predicting the precise score, 5 points for getting the winning margin right, and 4 points for getting the winner right. You can create “mini-leagues” including yourself with any of your friends who also have the app, so that you can compare scores.

The app also acts as a social network – all iPundit users can chat with each other, so you can broadcast your footie opinions to the whole network.

What we think?

The actual app here seems fine. It’s a pretty good way of proving who’s the best football pundit among your group of friends. What interests me most is the way it’s being marketed. The central branding icon of iPundit is the figure you can see above – Mr. Pundit. He acts as a kind of “ideal” football fan. He’s a non-threatening, scarf wearing everyman, who delivers football facts and bad jokes through the app. Mr. Pundit represents the way in which this app is being sold – the advertising is geared in an attempt to appeal to as many different market segments that might interested in football as possible. The three main audiences are as follows:

Football obsessed: those who know the names and stats of every player for every team get to prove that knowledge to all and sundry

Armchair fans: Thomson Sport describes this segment as those “who only follow England when they do well”

Lady fans: this segment can best be summed up by a quote from Thomson Sport’s Lynsey Devon, who said: “I’ll admit I’m an armchair fan but I have already downloaded iPundit.  I’m a bit partial to fit men running around a field in a pair of tight shorts and I’ll be sharing my views with the girls.”

All in all, I can imagine iPundit doing well for itself. The combination of mobile and World Cup fever is going to be big (you can see more reports on that here), and Thomson Sport has positioned this app well to take advantage of that.