The world cup is allready half way and there are a lot of things to talk about from a sports point of view but also from a marketing point of view. England will face Germany in another classic but one thing we should take into consideration are the ambush marketing techniques that are taking place in the World Cup and efforts of FIFA to protect its partners.

Well , I have to be honest I learned the term reading the tweets of Professor Simon Chadwick and reading a couple of the examples that we had in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa until now. But what is ambush marketing?

The simplistic term is what you can find in Wikipedia….The easiest place nowadays to learn stuff like that.  “Ambush marketing is a marketing campaign that takes place around an event but does not involve payment of a sponsorship fee to the event. For most events of any significance, one brand will pay to become the exclusive and official sponsor of the event in a particular category or categories, and this exclusivity creates a problem for one or more other brands. Those other brands then find ways to promote themselves in connection with the same event, without paying the sponsorship fee and without breaking any laws.”

In other words, Adidas is the official sports clothes provider for the 2010 world cup. Despite that Nike finds ways to make such advertising that it will manage to connect there brand with the World Cup without paying anything extra. How can they do that? Well the “write the future” ad campaign they made was so successful that it managed to convince customers according to reports that they are the brand more connected with the World Cup.

Its not only that… there are numerous examples in history but its getting more and more obvious that this will increase as years go by. The only thing that suprises me is that i didnt found any obvious report about ambush marketing in Athens Olympics 2004 …but then i maybe wrong.

The result of the 36 girls from netherland being detained by fifa for promoting another kind of beer with there clotheswas another obvious ambush marketing example. Whether it was done on purpose or not by the Bavaria beer is not of any importance. Many people now have learned the name of the beer and they will sure try to have one. The publicity that it got was everything they wanted.

Despite all that the officials should be really concearned about the implication of all those events. Why someone should pay so much money to be the official sponsor of one tournament when he knows that he can get more recognition and more attention by using other marketing techniques?

Ambush marketing is one of those tehniques that we are going to see more and more in the future and its good to keep an eye. Somethings that in tv looks so natural to happen maybe a result of an organised effort.