With the cut throat market competition, brands are leaving no stone unturned to leverage any opportunity to catch the eyeballs. Realizing the true sense of “out of sight is out of mind”, huge investments been made to push brand visibility especially during popular events. In marketing ecosystem, sponsorships have been considered as a great medium to ride into the event popularity & its follower base thus fetching audience engagement & brand recall during the purchase decision. With so many brands lining up for official sponsor tag, sponsorship has been further classified. Today, the term “sponsor” has turned to be a “partner” so as to accommodate as many as brands possible.

Title sponsor, Co- Sponsors, Ticketing Partner, Food & Beverage Partner, Venue Partner, Wellness Partner, Hospitality Partner are some of the categories recently evolved.

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Ambush Marketing

But the game of sponsorship is not a child’s play. Last year Nike agreed to commit whopping $7.1 billion to outfit the University of Michigan’s varsity athletic teams as a sponsor for a contract of 11 years. Similarly, Chinese mobile phone major VIVO bags the sponsorship for Indian Premier League (IPL) for almost Rs 400 crore for five years. In such money driven branding exercises, a new way of marketing has been discovered by the brands themselves and is called “Ambush Marketing”. In this marketing strategy, an advertiser “ambushes” an event to compete for exposure against competing advertisers. In other words, it is way to promote brand awareness in covert ways. For example, during soccer matches (especially during EPL) you might have noticed a group of people sitting (near players / coach pavilion) wearing same shirt, promoting a brand which is not the part of the tournament in any way. Similarly, Kodak ran a campaign during the 1984 Olympic Games. Though its direct competitor Fuji was the official sponsor of the games, Kodak ran an aggressive television ad campaign that created the perception that they were the official sponsors. Even now days before the release of films in Bollywood, many brands can be seen promoting film trailers on TV with their product mentions to create a perception of some association with the film.

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This marketing strategy is a great motivation for smaller companies those who cannot afford big sponsorship value & can still leverage the event.Some of the examples of ambush marketing is as below

Ambush Marketing              Ambush Marketing