Ambush marketing :

It is the kind of marketing done by a non sponsor in an event pretending to be a sponsor thereby
accumulating the benefits that are to be accrued by the true sponsor. Ambush marketing has
turned out to be a real problem in major cultural as well as sporting events. One of the most
important and first examples of ambush marketing are the so called “credit card wars” that
culminated in the ’84 summer Olympics in los angeles. To give a gist of what happened there
was a major advertising war that occurred between American Express and its primary rival Visa,
the latter was the official sponsor for the Olympics whereas the former created a fictious
association with the Olympics via something called the “Olympic Heritage Committee” this was
met with fierce criticism by the IOC and it stated that it would release a video of prominent
athletes breaking the American express cards in protest of its actions. The main problem with
ambush marketing is that the words symbols and and terminology associated with this are
commonplace and by extension generic in nature which makes it really hard for them to be
protected by the intellectual property laws in place in the said country in which the event is
taking place. In some very successful cases the companies that commit ambush marketing don’t
even use these generic terminologies or symbols associated with the same, one of the best
examples to this is the Nike advertisement during the fifa football world cup, the advertisement
was in the form of a video in which several prominent players from different nationalites are
involved. Eventhough no connection is directly made to the world cup the advertisement was so
successful that a lot of people that Nike was the official sponsor for the world cup. In addition to
this Nike was also involved in a form of ambush markeing called saturation ambush wherein
which they buy all the advertising space near the sporting event and force the official sponsor
into small spaces which are inconspicuous. The ambush marketing strategy of Nike was so over
the top that IOC thought it was time to take the matter into its own hands whereby it held a
meeting with the top Nike officials and went to the extent of threatening that they would ban all
Nike related advertisements in the future. The antics of Nike even forced the creation of “safe
zones” which were the exclusive advertising space that was granted to the official sponsors. The
problem with anti ambush marketing measures is that it sometimes curtails free speech. Anti
ambush marketing measures have come under severe criticisms in many places as even
individual athletes were in somecases not allowed to exhibit their sponsors in their apparel.