Here’s a wonderful marketing-linked cartoon from the great Tom Fishburne…
“One of the great marketing campaigns from the 2012 Olympics didn’t come from an official sponsor. It came from a headphone brand called Beats by Dr. Dre. The Beats brand customized headphones in national colors and then strategically sampled them to athletes. Athletes wore Beats everywhere in the games, particularly in swimming.”
Full post from Tom at “the power of ambush marketing”.
If you’re not familiar with the term…
…”Ambush Marketing” is a strategy where advertisers aim to capitalise on a major event without paying a sponsorship fee.
Now I confess that this ploy was somewhat lost on me as I haven’t been following the swimming…
…but I have noticed that many of the athletes routinely “plug-in” during downtime.
I have mixed feelings about the use of “ambush” marketing tactics. In many cases the main sponsors are pretty inept and unimaginative. And I can understand that in a fiercely competitive market a big company might not want to be completely shut out.
And I can admire the aggressiveness and cleverness of some of the campaigns such as the one from Beats and also some of these…
I particularly like the Bavaria Beer ploy!
On the other hand, there are some ethical issues here, not to mention some fairly serious legal issues to consider.
Having said all that, it strikes me there are a couple of lessons here…
1) Successful ambush campaigns give something of value to the people who are being co-opted.
2) The “official” sponsors might do better to run their own ambush-style campaigns!! If it’s going to happen, they might be better off pre-empting the competition…plus they don’t have any legal complications.
Most direct response marketers, especially small and medium-sized businesses, aren’t going to want to get involved in the kind of high-profile and expensive campaigns illustrated in these examples.
However, I’m a big advocate of “event-driven marketing” as discussed regularly in my monthly “Looking Ahead – Marketing Calendar” posts and these campaigns can provide some useful ideas for your own promotions.