Ambush marketing – will it seal its own fate?
Marketing is warfare and all’s fair in …
Enter ambush marketing. Some would say – the Australian Football League (AFL) for example – that it’s unfair to their sponsors. Now governments, such as in Victoria, are passing legislation specifically aimed at the airspace above sporting grounds, the bane of the AFL with the Holden airship.
And it doesn’t stop there. The AFL is now seeking a considerable increase in the number of specified events in which the skies above the footy will, by law, be clear of flying banners, dirigibles and skywriting, to name a few obvious suspects.
Since the late 1980s, the Olympics have been plagued with ambush marketing. In 1996 at Atlanta, Nike, which was not the official footwear supplier or sponsor, bought large numbers of outdoor advertising sites near the main stadium and erected a ‘Nike centre’, clearly visible from the main stadium.
Since that time cities bidding for the Games must guarantee control of specified outdoor advertising sites during the Games. It reportedly cost Athens an additional $US10 million.
Special legislation was passed for the Sydney Olympics (the Sydney 2000 Act) to strengthen SOCOG’s (the organising committee’s) hand in preventing its sponsors from being undermined. Yet as you may recall, Qantas ran a variety of sports-related advertising in the years leading up to 2000. The outcome was that more than twice as many Australians thought Qantas was the ‘Olympic airline partner’ – which it wasn’t – than Ansett, which was.
The sports-related ads did not make any references that would mislead people and thus be the possible subject of trade practices litigation. Indeed, one ad for an Australia Wide Olympic Sale for special fares even had an asterisk attached to ‘Olympic’ with a fine print message (no doubt in six point type at the bottom) “Qantas is not an Olympic sponsor”.
In 2000, the Qantas campaign was applauded by most people in the industry as smart marketing, yet by the time the Holden airship flew over the MCG during the 2006 AFL Grand Final, where Toyota was a major sponsor, could we sense a little public backlash?
It may be that the ‘dirty tricks’ aspect of ambush marketing will be picked up by an increasingly aware market and these negative connotations will take the shine off ‘look what I did for a tenth of the price’.
Footnote: In researching this column, I did find one ad from the 1990s run by NZ Telecom that made me smile. Its aim was to promote the use of its mobiles at the Olympics and it looked like this:
The New Zealand Olympic Association took NZ Telecom to court on the basis that the ad suggested an association between the company and the Olympic movement. It lost.
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