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A form of marketing that has proliferated in the past decade is called--depending on how vociferous the participants--"ambush" or "parasite" marketing. It makes those who are ambushed quite angry. Those who do the waylaying, however, consider themselves shrewd marketers.
What's all the yelling about?
Welcome to the expensive world of event sponsorship--a world in which there is no clear legal protection. Spending even millions of dollars on sponsorship will not protect a sponsor from being ambushed by a competitor. Ambushers use advertising or other marketing tools to give the impression that the competing company is the official sponsor.
To make matters worse, the consumer--the target of both the original sponsor and the ambusher--often is confused by it all or just doesn't care.
To explore the practice, go back 10 years, when corporations began to move more and more into the specialized and costly practice of event marketing, sponsoring major occurrences, especially such important sports competitions as the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Event sponsorship, they found, was a visible and splashy way to get a company's advertising message and image to massive audiences.
Such visibility does not run cheap--each of a dozen companies paid $20 million or more for a worldwide sponsorship of the 1992 Olympics, for example, and comparable sponsorship for the 1996 games has been estimated at around $40 million. In return, the sponsor gets certain perquisites and prime advertising connections with the event and often expends enormous sums for the sole right to use the event logo. In the case of the Olympics, a worldwide sponsor is entitled to use the five-ring logo over the quadrennium, the four-year period between Olympiads.
Sponsoring events on a large scale can be traced to the 1984 Olympics, when organizer Peter Ueberroth offered corporate sponsorships as a way of ensuring that the host city of Los Angeles would not incur the kind of financial loss--said to have reached $1 billion--experienced by Montreal from the 1976 games.
The chief benefit to a corporate sponsor is positive consumer recognition and response. Everybody feels good about a momentous corporate-sponsored cultural event, for example, or about the Super Bowl. The visibility and beneficial customer identification associated with event marketing attract competitors who have not paid for sponsorships. By means...