With the Vancouver Winter Olympics just ahead, the action on the slopes, links and half-pipes won’t be the only competition. For every Olympics, and other high-profile sporting events, ambush marketing often provides a sideshow. Ambush marketing refers to when an advertiser that is not an official sponsor of an event tries to associate itself with the event without paying any sponsorship fees, and every Olympic provides a new venue for creative ambush marketers. This is frustrating for the advertisers that pay millions of dollars to be official sponsors and it can weaken an event organizer’s bargaining position when trying to line up sponsors for future events. Like most events, sponsorship fees are a big part of the Olympic budget. The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games announced that it had already secured over $720 million in sponsorship fees for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In exchange for those sponsorship fees, official sponsors typically get exclusive rights to certain advertising opportunities such as banners on the race course, naming rights to tournaments or event locations, being the official provider of a team’s uniform or shoes, merchandise tie-ins, and VIP tickets. Examples of ambush marketing include: advertising on billboards that are near the sporting event, for example, outside a stadium or along a marathon route; flying airborne banners or huge inflatable over the event; handing out freebies such as t-shirts, flags or caps near the event so that those inside a stadium are wearing or waving the logos of an ambush marketer; creating ads that reference the sporting event, usually in generic terms to avoid liability for trademark infringement; sponsoring individual players at sporting events so that they are wearing the ambush marketer’s logo; sponsoring a news conference where team players are invited to speak; advertising a sweepstakes which will award tickets to sporting events as prizes; and running ads after an event congratulating the teams or players.
There have been many well-known ambush marketing skirmishes at the winter and summer Olympics involving big name brands such as Kodak and Fujifilm, American Express and VISA, and Reebok and Nike. Just recently, Major League Soccer filed suit against Black & Decker, accusing the company of engaging in several ambush marketing tactics surrounding games featuring the Mexican national soccer team. MLS claims that, as part of Black & Decker’s marketing strategy to reach more Hispanic consumers, the company set up booths near soccer matches featuring the Mexican national team to advertise its products, used MLS logos and trademarks in promotional flyers, and gave away tickets to MLS soccer matches to consumers who purchased $600 worth of Black & Decker tools. MLS has an exclusive power tools sponsorship with Makita, a Black & Decker competitor.
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