The World Cup is almost into the second round but the real competition might be taking place behind the cameras, between the broadcasters. In the U.S., two companies have television broadcast rights: Disney (ABC and ESPN) has the English-language rights and Univision (Univision, Telefutura and Galavision) has the Spanish-language rights.

It was expected that Unvision would do well in the ratings since their Latino audience is generally regarded as being more fanatical about soccer than the “gringo” viewers of ABC or even ESPN audience. This proved to be the case during the inaugural match when Univision drew 5.6 million viewers, almost double the audience of ESPN. However, Univision did not beat ESPN during any of the following seven matches, and got especially trounced during the England versus USA match which was attracted 10.8 million viewers on ABC; the largest audience for any U.S. World Cup match since 1994 .

The strong ratings for Univision and ESPN demonstrate both the strength of Univision (to compete effectively in sports against ESPN) and the growing attraction for soccer in the U.S. (since the ABC ratings have surprised most media pundits). It’s been difficult to get information for later telecasts but Univision did issue a press release for the Mexico versus France match noting that their audience of 5.8 million was double ESPN2′s and the most watched game to date for Univision during the 2010 World Cup. Odds are strong that this record will be broken by this Sunday when Argentina plays Mexico in a second-round match at 2:30 p.m. This is also likely to be another “victoria” for Univision against ESPN.

I recently took a look at Interbrand’s 2008 Best Global Brands is a ranking of the world’s top 100 brands “on the basis of how much they’re likely to earn in the future,” or in other words the ‘brand value.’

Interestingly enough there are three media brands on this list: Disney, MTV and Thomson Reuters. No other media brands appear, because either a) they didn’t rank or b) they were exempted from consideration since Interbrand requires that “the brand must have at least one-third of revenues outside of its country-of-origin.” I’m going to do some more research and try to see which brands got exempted but in the mean time here is a graph displaying the brand value of Disney, MTV and Thomson Reuters. The last brand has been ranked only since 2008.

What is immediately obvious is that Disney’s brand value is far greater than the others. I would consider the following factors as to why this is the case.

• Time: Disney has simply been in the marketplace for longer than the other companies, and its brand has therefore penetraded various generations of consumers.
• Business interests: Disney has movies, theme parks, TV programming, cruise lines and many other businesses that MTV and Thomson are not involved in. Of course Disney’s brand must be strong to work in so many different businesses, but successful business interests would also reinforce and strengthen the brand.
• Prominence: Lastly I think that Disney’s brand is more prominently used than many other media companies. More on this below.

For a lot media companies the parent brand acts as ‘endorser’ while a shows or movie is the ‘driver’ brand which effectively steers the relationship with the consumer. A good example of this would be a network like NBC and the show ER. Viewers are watching NBC, but they are choosing to watch ER.

In other cases like Disney the parent brand maintains a higher degree of prominence, and is more important in managing the relationship with the consumer. I believe that many parents will take their children to see a Disney movie simply because it’s a Disney movie. I also believe that the MTV brand has a similar prominent role in the relationship with its audience, and that this in part is why the MTV brand is on this top 100 list.

When I first saw this Interbrand list, I though it would be interesting to see a ranked list of all media companies and not just Disney, MTV and Thomson Reuters. However now I think it would be better to see a study comparing the weight of media parent brands to the media property brands they manage.