The Real Score: May the best marketers take the golds (2024)

STEVE MCKELVEY

With the Summer Olympics in Paris upon us, expect the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to start complaining about ambush marketing. Ambush what, you ask? Ambush marketing – it’s a term unique to the business world of sport. History has it that the term was first coined in the pages of Advertising Age in its coverage of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games. The chief combatants (to play on the ambush imagery) were Official Film Sponsor Fuji and the venerable Kodak. Given the possibility of Fuji using this Olympics sponsorship to gain a foothold in the U.S. photography market, Kodak hired IMG to recommend a course of action to prevent this. The Mark H. McCormack archives, housed in the W.E.B. DuBois Library on the UMass Amherst campus, provide a trail of memos between Kodak and IMG executives, including one that captures Kodak’s eventual approach: “There are several opportunities available to Kodak which could be used in key markets to blunt Fuji’s activities” (had Ad Age had access to these documents, the practice may have ended up being called “blunt marketing”). The tactics IMG recommended would become standard operating procedure in ambush marketing playbooks: buy up outdoor billboards in prominent, high-traffic areas; purchase advertising time within ABC’s telecast of the Games; and secure official sponsorship of tangential but related events. In this case, Kodak sponsored the 1983 Los Angeles Times International Track Meet (“It will be the only opportunity for foreign track and field teams to compete at the 1984 Olympic site prior to the Olympics themselves,” read the recommending memo).

But, enough of the history lesson. I have spent the bulk of my academic career researching ambush marketing. The definition I put forth in 1994 is still oft-cited in academic circles: “a company’s intentional efforts to weaken – or ambush – its competitors “officialsponsorship”by engaging in promotions and advertising that trade off the event or property’s goodwill and reputation, and that seek to confuse the buying public as to which companies really hold official sponsorship rights.” In virtually all the research studies, three tenets continue to hold: 1) the average sports fan/consumer cannot name (at least unaided) official sponsors of major sporting events – quick: who’s the official vehicle of the upcoming Olympics?;2) they have no idea what “ambush marketing” is; and 3) they don’t care if a company is engaging in ambush marketing (after all, it’s tough to care about behavior that you don’t even know is occurring!).

Beginning right after the commercial bizarre/ambush-fest that was the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, the IOC began devising anti-ambush marketing strategies to protect its official sponsors from ambushers who would steal their thunder and their potential customers through activities that the IOC has branded as unethical, immoral, and unfair – and which they’ve even sought to make illegal. Why such concern? The IOC claims that without the financial support of its official sponsors, the Games themselves would be in jeopardy … and if their official sponsors keep getting ambushed, they’ll eventually cease paying for official sponsorships (fact: there has never been evidence to support this proposition).

For this reason, the IOC has always sought to “own” the entire thematic space of Olympic sports. Hence, any country bidding to host an Olympic Games has to guarantee that it will enact event-specific ambush marketing legislation that makes it easier for the IOC and host country to stop and/or sue non-sponsors whose marketing activities “imply any association” with the Games that – under any other situation – would be wholly legal. From a practical standpoint, this over-reaching legislation ultimately impacts the local citizens and small businesses (the taxpayers who helped secure and pay for the Games) by scaring them into not doing or saying anything to show their support of the Games; in law, we call this chilling their freedom of speech and expression (oftentimes simply for fear of getting sued).

The IOC also requires the host city to enact legislation establishing so-called “Clean Zones” around the premises, ostensibly to ensure the safety of spectators … but really intended as a legal way to ensure that competitors to their official sponsors can’t get in with their signs and giveaway items. In ambush marketing circles (it’s a small circle of us!), the enforcement actions taken against everyone from local bakeries to church knitting groups are legendary.

And then there’s the notorious Rule 40 which, until successfully challenged in court by an organization representing German Olympic athletes, prevented the athletes’ personal sponsors – the companies that financially supported the individual athletes in training in non-Olympic years –from having any association or public recognition with that athlete or the Games in the weeks preceding and through the Games (unless, of course, they were also an Official Sponsor). That 2019 ruling led the IOC to ease the restrictions on athletes’ personal sponsors, and allowed each country to develop its own set of procedures on how to manage Rule 40 moving forward. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committees’ process entails hoops galore that ourathletes and their personal sponsors must navigate in order for the athlete to be permitted to, for instance, post up to seven (yes, seven and only seven!) social media messages thanking their sponsors; and the sponsor to post one congratulatory message … as long as the post does not suggest that the use of sponsor’s product helped athlete’s performance and does not include any iconic Olympic imagery. The restrictions and limitations placed on both athletes and personal sponsors border on draconian.

Given the manner in which the IOC has historically wielded their monopoly power in their efforts to “own” the entire thematic space of Olympic sports, it’s tough not to root for the ambush marketers. Fortunately, companies that are proficient in ambush marketing know where the legal lines are and as long as they are not crossed, they have every legal and moral right to conduct marketing campaigns that leverage the Games.

Why should the official sponsors have a “free pass” to market around the Games with no fear of their competitors? This only makes for lazy marketers. As I noted earlier, sports fans don’t know and don’t care who’s “official” and who’s “ambushing.” What they respond to is the better marketing campaign – which marketer best grabs and holds their attention, which company offers them the better deal.The IOC shouldn’t be given any special privileges. Its official sponsors support the Games with tens of millions of dollars in the hope of selling more products and attracting new customers. That makes the Olympics a business venture. And like any business, it should succeed or fall on the merits of its product and not be protected by special legislation.So, may the best marketers take the golds!

Steve McKelvey, J.D. is a Full Professor in the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management at the University of Massachusetts. He is a former Department Chair and Graduate Program Director, and can be reached atmckelvey@isenberg.umass.edu