JVC has been an official partner of the UEFA European Football Championship since 1980 when the final tournament was held in Italy. Let's look back the history of the ever-growing and ever-prospering UEFA EURO and its supporter JVC in each tournament respectively.
The memorial 10th tournament took place in England, the mother country of football. England had been suffering from the poor performance in international competitions for a long time, but this time they made it to the semi-finals with the cheers of home fans. Although they lost to Germany who won the championship in the end, England succeeded in proving their complete comeback. At that time the economy surrounding European football was growing rapidly mainly due to television rights and merchandising.
With the coming of the digital society, JVC continuing to support the UEFA EURO as a top partner aggressively developed digital products to cope with the social change promptly. In 1995 JVC introduced GR-DV1, the world's smallest and lightest digital video camera aiming for market penetration of DV format video camcorders, and the next year GR-DVM1, a digital video camera with LCD monitor was released.
The UEFA EURO 2000 was the first co-hosted European championship staged by the Netherlands and Belgium. Despite the worries of others, their challenge to host a large-scale international competition in two countries proved a great success. One of the co-hosts Netherlands made it to the semi-finals, and the final between Italy and France was a high-level match which ended in France's second championship won by a dramatic golden goal in extra time.
While this competition showed a new potential for success of co-hosted events, it also showed a new style of sporting events in the 21st century with social changes caused by the spread of satellite broadcasting and the internet. JVC joined this event of the new century as a top partner and fully achieved its goals including a great success in its marketing strategy in the Netherlands.
Having established the status of a global football event, UEFA EURO achieved a great success in the 12th tournament in Portugal also. At that time Europe had begun to be reorganized based on the framework of EU, and the euro as an international currency was starting to build up its value gradually. The UEFA EURO 2004 was received enthusiastically worldwide, and with the surprise of Greece winning the title for the first time having beaten the hosts Portugal, it succeeded in showing its quality as an international event.
JVC again contributed toward the success of the event as a top partner, including setting up giant screens in the host cities' fan zones (for public viewing) to entertain fans who could not come to the stadiums. In the same year, JVC introduced the Everio GZ-MC200/MC100, the world's first hard disk camcorder.
The 13th tournament in 2008 will be a co-hosted event again staged by Austria and Switzerland, and JVC continues to take part as a top partner. Since 1980, this will be the eighth consecutive championship to receive JVC support, creating the world's longest sponsorship as a top partner of UEFA EURO.
During this tournament JVC not only offered the Predictor game at UEFA's official website, uefa.com, but also opened its original site in 7 languages dedicated to this event, jvcfootball.com. It succeeded in conveying excitement and emotion of football to many supporters through JVC's giant screens which were the centerpiece of public viewing. JVC organized "Video Fan Message" project at the stadiums and fan zones, which was linked together with jvcfootball.com to gain new football fans. And the series of fan message events helped to promote the latest Everio series evolved from the Everio GZ-HD7, the world's first full high-definition hard disk camcorder introduced in 2007.
 |
 |