Ambush marketing

Ambush marketing. What is Ambush marketing and how is it done?

Ambush marketing, also known as parasitic marketing, is a marketing strategy in which a company deliberately takes advantage of an event or campaign whose sponsorship/cost is borne by another company.

1. What is Ambush marketing?

Put simply, ambush marketing is when the branding effort of a company that sponsors an event or campaign is exploited by another company to promote its own brand (usually a competitor, although they are not always companies in direct competition).

Ambush marketing is always heavily criticized and many professionals dislike it, since they consider it dishonest and its main purpose is to usurp the relevance that should belong to the company that made the marketing investment.

In this way, it causes serious harm to the company that legitimately sponsors the event (it is associated with mass events, but there are various forms of ambush marketing that are not always carried out at mass/sporting events).

2. Types of Ambush marketing

Without going into whether Ambush marketing is ethical, legal or any other related assessment, let’s differentiate between the two most common types of Ambush marketing: Direct Ambush marketing and Indirect Ambush marketing.

2.1. Direct Ambush marketing

Ambush marketing is when a brand (the attacker) takes advantage of a mass event or campaign to “attack” one of its sponsoring brands (the attacked brand), so that the audience gets the impression that the attacking brand is actually a sponsor of the event when it is not, causing confusion among the audience.

At the same time, direct ambush marketing is also carried out by using the logo of a mass event or brand without authorization, and that logo or image is incorporated into messages and actions related to the event.

It is a violation of trademark rights and always leads to legal action, although sometimes the damage done is so great that the financial fines the attacker has to pay make the direct ambush marketing action profitable for them.

2.2. Indirect Ambush marketing

As its name suggests, indirect Ambush marketing is the action of confusing the audience in a very subtle way to make them believe, in a veiled way, that the attacking brand is an implicit part of the event (sponsor).

The hints in this case are very subtle but noticeable to the audience, and are carried out without violating the property of the attacked brand or of the event itself.

In general, the “indirect” way of causing confusion involves using logos, messages and symbols that closely resemble the official ones, so that the public comes to associate the product/event with a brand that is not an official sponsor.

3. Examples of ambush marketing

Just three examples are enough to get a good idea of what ambush marketing is:

3.1. Women’s marathon and AXE

During a women’s marathon held in Aarhus (Denmark) in 2008, AXE carried out an ambush marketing action that eclipsed the event’s sponsors and cost it a ridiculously small amount for the impact it obtained.

They placed an actor in front of the starting line of the Marathon wearing a black T-shirt with the AXE deodorant logo and a bottle of its deodorant, right at the start of the marathon.

The actor sprayed himself with AXE deodorant and ran in front of the crowd of women, making it look as if they were chasing him, attracted by the “AXE effect” of the deodorant’s fragrance.

3.2. Panasonic and Beats by Dr. Dre

The Olympic Games capture the world’s attention and are a thriving place for Ambush marketing. During the London 2012 Olympics, Panasonic, which was one of the official sponsors of the event, had to fight against an ambush marketing campaign.

Beats got many of the athletes to wear their Beats headphones before competing in their events, which led Panasonic to complain to the organizers. Since it was the Apple subsidiary’s products that were being displayed on screen and not theirs as the official sponsor.

This led the Olympic Committee to prohibit athletes from using Beats products, but not from using products from Panasonic, the official sponsor of the Olympic Games.

3.3 Budweiser and Bavarian Beer

A football World Cup gets a lot of media coverage, and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa saw several ambush marketing actions, one of them carried out by the Dutch brewery Bavaria to steal the spotlight from Budweiser (the official beer of the event).

During the match between Holland and Denmark, 36 girls dressed in orange and mixed in with the Dutch fans promoted the Bavaria brewery, and their removal by security staff made its ambush marketing campaign go even more viral.

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Ambush marketing