Is Social Media Ambush Marketing’s Favorite New Ammo?

As we turn the page and look ahead to 2010, let us address a topic most marketers have a strong opinion on: ambush. Whether you believe ambush marketing of official events is creative and cost-efficient or an unethical and illegal mortal marketing sin, the fact is 2010 will see more of it than many marketers care to envision. Global events such as the Olympics and World Cup will fuel the fire, as they have in the past, but this time the battleground may be waged on a relatively new frontier: social media.

Sure, some will attempt to solve ambush with legal claims such as trademark infringement and unfair competition. Last week Major League Soccer filed a lawsuit against Black and Decker for their Dewalt promotion around exhibition matches (competitor, Makita, is the official sponsor of MLS). However, ambush marketers – and their legal teams – will likely find new ways to skirt IP issues with the Olympics, especially in an environment without precedent like social media. When you’re spending 100 million for an official deal, both property and sponsor should probably be proactively identifying ways to mitigate ambush rather than (or at least as well as) relying on reactive legal remedies. Consider this, Coke spent an estimated $70 million to be one of the top 12 Olympic sponsors — and $5 million to $15 million more on the torch relay, but according to at least one study, up to 60% of consumers believed Pepsi was the official sponsor in Beijing. Scary stuff for CMO’s and properties.

So what exactly is ambush? There’s a lot of debate around the definition itself. Wikipedia sets it out like this:

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.

Ambush of course is nothing new. Here’s a few of the most notorious cases around the Olympics and World Cup, courtesy of Nicholas Burton and Simon Chadwick’s Typoiogy of Ambush Marketing: The Methods and Strategies of Ambushing in Sport, which examined over 350 recent examples of ambush.

Burton and Chadwick note that the practice has evolved over time from broadcast sponsorship campaigns and billboard advertising around venues to more aggressive off-site strategies. Some go as far as getting fans to distribute the ambush marketer’s messages for them. Is social media the natural evolution? The scary thing for official sponsors should be the fact that the costs to scale an ambush campaign are greatly reduced through social media. At least with past mediums, there were still some relevant hard costs involved in scaling broadcast, billboard and street team ambush campaigns, even if paling in comparison to official rights fees. Not so with social media. It gets even more complicated when you’re talking about events like the World Cup where 99.99% of the engaged audience is a viewer, not an attendee. Properties stand a much better chance of “owning” their on-site experience with their official sponsors (lest we forget this …err awkward example of property vigilance from the ‘06 WC). It’s much harder to own an online experience, especially when content is so widely disseminated among various sites and sources. In many cases properties can’t even keep their broadcasts ambush free.

In 2004, John Crompton issued a report entitled “Sponsorship ambushing in sport” that outlined these categories of ambush: