Ambush Marketing Essay

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------------------------------------------------- Module Code 66-6958-00L (B) Module Name: Contempory Issues in Sport Bsc(Hons) Sport Business Management Hong Kong Name:Tang Kang To Aries Ambush Marketing – An invisible war in sport event Introduction War is happening in the business of sport. Sports sponsorship is a very important part of a sports event, however, for the past twenty-five years, the nature of sports sponsorship has been changed drastically. The term “ambush marketing was first created in [O’Sullivan and Murphy 1998]. It highlights sponsorship’s emergence as a core promotion tool: “The growth of commercial sponsorship has been perhaps the most striking development in marketing communications over the last two decades”. [Bayless, A. 1988] In 1988, companies and products try to ride on the official sponsor by using different kinds of market strategies without contributing any financial support to the events. It usually occurs in major sports events, such as Olympic or football world cups. [Leimer, J. 1996] Throughout the years, there were heaps of examples of ambush marketing in all kinds of from practiced in many sports events. One of the best known example: in 1994, American Express created advertisements claiming that Americans do not need "Visas" - an official sponsor of the Olympic Games, to travel to Norway for the Winter Olympics, such that Visa complained loudly to the incident. American Express said that the commercial advertisement was not referring to the Olympics and was not an attempt to ambush Visa.[ Jon Kelly (2010)] From that, we can see there is a serious danger to both the official sponsor and the event owners (e.g., Curthoys & Kendall, 2001; McKelvey & Grady, 2004) and an obvious growing number of companies are gaining attention from the audience by using the ambush
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