Ambush Marketing

Sponsorship has grown up. It's multi-faceted. It's quantifiable. And it's widely acknowledged to be at the forefront of modern marketing. It is not just mature, it is wise.

In the past, sponsors have concentrated on creating bonds with events, rather than with their target markets. An example would be a brewery that decides that it is in their best interests to be aligned with football. They spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating an indelible link between their brand and football — they put logos all over each other, the players drink the beer, they run ads, and thank each other at end-of-year dinners — with the assumption that after all of this overt linking, Joe Beerdrinker is just going to “get it,” whatever that “it” may be.

Unfortunately for all involved, it's just not happening. People aren't noticing signage anymore and we don't bother with the convoluted mental gymnastics required to transfer attributes from an event to a brand (e.g., “if Beer X is associated with football, and football is manly, then Beer X must be manly”). We have all become very good at editing the few marketing messages that matter to us from the hundreds that merely clutter our universe.

Many would say that leverage is the key to maximizing sponsorship returns, and it does help, but even if a sponsorship is very thoroughly leveraged using the old model, the focus of that leverage is football, not Joe Beerdrinker. It may catch Joe's attention, but it is unlikely to really matter to him. And to be an active part of the sponsorship, such as participating in promotions, Joe Beerdrinker is required to make the lion's share of the effort. It is hard work wasted, which brings us to the new model of sponsorship, The Conduit.

First, we have to ask ourselves, is it really a brewer's job to “align with” football? Is it in the company mission statement to be “synonymous with” football? No. A brewer's job is to sell more beer by getting people to try their beer, engendering loyalty to their beer, and getting the companies who sell their beer to promote it more than their competitors. Their job is to connect with target markets — internal, external, and intermediary. Sports doesn't buy the beer, the fans buy the beer. Football is simply a means to an end — a tool — and that's it. How they, and we, use that tool is what separates good from great sponsors.

I find ambush marketing fascinating. All the drama, paranoia, and subterfuge are very entertaining to watch and, of course, gossip about at industry events — at least if you're not the one being ambushed. But one of my favorite things about ambush is that it's so much fun to argue about.

Both sides — pro- and anti-ambush — have excellent points. So good, in fact, that I wouldn't have any problem vigorously defending either point of view. At the outset, I will admit that some of these arguments contradict each other. Whether you want to harness the opportunity or defend against opportunists, it requires an understanding of both sides.

The case against ambush

Ambush is unethical. Ambush is immoral. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A fat lot of good those arguments have done in stopping it happening! And yet, those are the arguments we hear the most.

If we want to stop ambush from happening, guilt hasn't worked and it isn't going to. Instead, we need to talk strategy. We need to make the business case against ambush marketing. There are a lot of strategic reasons not to ambush.

When a sponsor makes a sponsorship investment, they are investing in potential, not results. They get results through what they do with the investment (i.e., how they leverage it).

One of the key factors in whether a sponsor is ambushable is whether they have effectively leveraged their investment. If they have succeeded in making their brand and the sponsorship meaningful to their target market, they will be difficult (but not impossible) to ambush. If not, they are a sitting duck.

But this raises the question: if a sponsor isn't leveraging well, and therefore isn't getting good results, then why bother? In that case, the sponsor doesn't need undermining, because they are their own worst enemy. Save your money, time, and effort.

Mainstream media love to write about ambush. Most business-to-business media do, too. It's salacious in a way that business stories rarely are, and very easy to spin into some kind of morality play.

Your target markets are going to see this coverage. Do you know what the impact will be? Will the positive you may gain from ambushing outweigh the potential negative of being pilloried in USA Today or the Financial Times?

Whether or not the coverage has any meaningful repercussions on how the public views you, one thing is certain: unless you are working for a Richard Branson-style rebel, you are risking a senior executive freak out. Do you really want that?

If you ambush, you are making a conscious decision to play the competition's game. Not only are you offering similar brands — you are competitors, after all — but you are choosing to forgo the unique selling point that creating your own sponsorship would give you in favour of sharing the exact same sponsorship platform with a competitor.

Is it really going to be better for you to pretend to be involved with something your competition sponsors rather than to be involved with an event that is exactly right for you? Play your own game. Invest your time and money in sponsorship activities that enhance your unique selling points, not ambushes that highlight your similarity to another brand.

Okay, let's say that everything is looking good for an ambush of a big event and you start your ambush activities a few months out. Assuming that the sponsor is a reasonable fit with the event to start with, all it will take is for them to implement some meaningful leverage and the effectiveness of your ambush will plummet.

If this happens, are the results you get from the ambush still going to be worth the potential media backlash? All the hard work? The headaches? Are you willing to risk it?

The basic premise of ambush marketing is that you are not partners with the event. Plenty of ambushers have shown that it is possible to gain marketing value from an event without being partners, but if you look at all that you are giving up, is it really worth it?

If you think sponsorship is hard work, try ambush. If you want to do an ambush that works, not only do you have to do virtually everything involved in a sponsorship, you also have to create relevance and benefits out of thin air, manage consumer, shareholder, and staff perceptions, and manage and measure the activity. Plus, you have to do all of this under the watchful eyes of probably hostile media.

If you still think ambush is a great idea, you really need to take this on board: most ambushes don't work. They are done the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, in the wrong environment, and the results are a total waste of time, energy, money and potential.

The case for ambush

Ambushes that work have the same underlying structure and work within the same type of environment. If those two things exist, and the appropriate amount of time, effort, resources, and internal buy-in are invested, ambush marketing can work really well.

This is not an everyday occurrence. Cards on the table, in my 20-year career, I have carried out five major ambushes and coached clients through a few more. Every one of them was a huge success. On the other hand, I have stopped clients from carrying out well over 100 ambushes that were ill-conceived, ego-driven disasters waiting to happen.

The secret is picking the right opportunities.