Friendly Fire: When Properties Are Behind Ambush Marketing Efforts
Posted: 6/4/2010 8:59:14 AM by
Jim Andrews | with 0 comments
I know you are probably sick of hearing about ambush marketing, what with the general media back on the topic in advance of the FIFA World Cup tourney starting in South Africa next week, but I have a couple of salient points I’d like to share on the topic.
The first (I’ll save the second for another post) has to do with a longtime pet peeve of ours here at IEG: self-ambush. This is when properties—or related properties such as leagues and their teams—sell rights and benefits that infringe on deals already sold.
There are plenty of example of this, such as properties who sell ads in program books to companies that compete with official sponsors rather than bundling such opportunities into their sponsorship packages.
Such missteps often are the result of poor program management and oversight rather than intentional plans to maximize revenue from multiple players in a category. The perpetrators are guilty of negligence, not premeditation.
But in some cases, rightsholders have a blatant disregard for rights already sold. Consider the following real-life example that a sponsorship agency account manager shared with me. (The agency’s client was the ambusher in this case.)
The client marketer wanted to run a New York-area promotion with both the Mets and Yankees, but both MLB teams had existing sponsors in the category. Case closed? Hardly.
The agency and client approached Major League Baseball Advanced Media about running a promotion on the Mets and Yankees Web sites (which MLBAM controls), to which the league arm said, essentially, “Sure. As long as the current partners don’t want to pay to do it.”
The existing sponsors’ only form of ambush “protection” was a phone call from MLBAM saying that a competitor was planning a $200,000 Web promotion on the team sites and that they had less than 10 days to decide whether they wanted to spend that much to block the competitor or let the promotion happen.
The incumbents declined and the promotion went ahead, complete with in-store, outdoor advertising and other promotional support.
I understand that leagues and their teams compete for dollars all of the time—and both incumbent team sponsors knew their exclusivity did not extend to the Web site—but looking at the bigger picture, what message does it send to potential partners on either the national or local level when marketing relationships are structured so as to allow a league to show such disregard for official team sponsors?
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Filed under: pro sports, sports, ambush marketing