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Ambush Marketing BC0150028 R.Subash

Ambush marketing is a practice where non-sponsors try to associate themselves with events like the Olympics or World Cup. It was pioneered by companies like American Express and Nike. Laws have tried to curb it but it remains difficult to fully control due to issues around generic terms. Measures to restrict it have also faced criticism for limiting free expression.

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Subash Chandran
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55 views2 pages

Ambush Marketing BC0150028 R.Subash

Ambush marketing is a practice where non-sponsors try to associate themselves with events like the Olympics or World Cup. It was pioneered by companies like American Express and Nike. Laws have tried to curb it but it remains difficult to fully control due to issues around generic terms. Measures to restrict it have also faced criticism for limiting free expression.

Uploaded by

Subash Chandran
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Ambush marketing

BC0150028

[Link]

Ambush marketing is a term that was first introduced by marketing strategist named Jerry Welsh,
ironically he was an American Express employee at that time. The company that introduced
ambush marketing to the world. Ambush marketing is a practice by which a non sponsor tries to
impersonate itself as the official sponsor of the said events thereby scoring a major marketing
win at the expense of the official sponsor. Ambush marketing is commonplace in major sporting
event such as Super Bowl, World cup and the Olympics. American Express and Nike are one of
the pioneers of ambush marketing. In the case of India it happens during the cricket world cup. It
was the1984 summer Olympics which was the starting point for ambush marketing exposing the
dirty advertising tricks employed by American Express at the cost of its rival Visa. It went to the
extent of using Asian games opening ceremony visuals inplace of the Olympic opening
ceremony. One of the best examples of ambush marketing in India is the 1996 Cricket world Cup
advertisement campaign in which Coca Cola was the official sponsor and its primary rival Pepsi
launched a major ad campaign with the tagline “nothing official about it”. Anti ambush
marketing laws have been put in place especially from the Sydney Olympics in which laws and
regulations were put in place to check ambush marketing. Despite the laws and regulations it is
very difficult to get control ambush marketing in all its ways and forms . one of the best
examples of this is Nike’s ad campaign during the FIFA World Cup. The problem with tackling
ambush marketing is that most of the content stays in the general domain. This issue was taken
into account during the Sydney Olympics when they passed the Sydney 2000 games ( Indicia
and images ) Protection act 1996. The main aim of this act was the regulation of the usage of
image and indicia associated with the Sydney 2000 olympic games. The act was one of a kind as
it solved the problem of generality associated with the events as it created list which contained
words such as “ Olympics “ and ‘olympian” along with a lot of general words associated with the
event such as “ gold,silver and bronze”. But this varies from country to country with respect to
their trademark and copyright laws as in the case of India in several case laws it was held that the
usage of generic terms such as World Cup and Cricket cannot be taken as ambush marketing.
Several measure to curb ambush marketing such as creating clean zones, not allowing non
sponser merchandise into the stadium and passing stricter laws have come under severe criticism
for curtailing freedom of expression and killing the spirit of the game.

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