Ambush Marketing, An Ongoing Practice, Hard To Prevent!

A report recently published by the Global Advertising Lawyers' Alliance (GALA) shows, with respect to the current millennium, a significant increase of the practice of ambush marketing in relation to events benefitting from broad media coverage. The practice, defined as "a free ride on the footboard of someone else's vehicle", develops primarily around events capable - due to modern means of communication - of targeting an audience of millions, sometime of billions. Quite obviously, it clashes with the event organizers' interests and even more with those of the sponsors, who usually provide the economic support (or at least a significant part of it), crucial for the event's performance. Multi-national companies, dedicating huge budgets for a partnership with organizers of events reaching out to broad audiences worldwide, find themselves more and more exposed to the tricks and smart moves of their main competitors, also doing business on a global level, not willing to undergo the economic burden of an official sponsorship and therefore relying on the practice of ambush marketing in order to associate their brands with a specific event.

After a first survey - performed back in 2011 - on the practice of ambush marketing GALA has decided to integrate its initial findings with an update after the 2012 London Games, considering that a significant number of major events were lining up as a 'spicy occasion' for ambushers: the FIFA 2014 Soccer World Championship in Brazil, the XX Commonwealth Games in Scotland in a few weeks, the Universal Exhibition EXPO 2015 in Milan (Italy) and the next Olympic Games in 2016 also in Brazil.

According to a summary of the main findings of the updated report:

In the past, it was primarily the International Olympic Committee - IOC to address some aspects of ambush marketing (such as the unauthorized use of the Olympic symbols) by promoting the Nairobi Treaty of September 26th, 1981, At the time - and for many years in the following - the statute laws of the countries scrutinized by the report did not reserve specific rules to the phenomenon, but tended to rely on the provisions set for preventing (or reacting to) acts of unfair competition, At the end of the Nineties such approach resulted totally unsatisfying to protect efficiently the positions of the official sponsors, who turned out to be essential for performing major events (due to their - increasing - economic contributions) and who's expectations frequently had to suffer from undue brand association put into place by their main competitors through questionable business practices . As a reaction to such trend, the organizers of prominent international sports events (IOC, UEFA, FIFA, etc.) decided to make the assignment of their most significant events conditional to a specific obligation of the hosting country for the...

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