Ambush marketing is a campaign that takes place around an event, without becoming an official sponsor. The granddaddy of such campaigns is Nike at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. They covered the city with Nike billboards and flyers, gave away branded merchandise and built a Nike centre right outside the main stadium. They generated as high a sponsor recognition rate as official partner Adidas, but at a fraction of the cost.
The underlying theory is that your company leverages the surplus potential of a sponsorship. That is, seek to establish a link between yourself and any positive event that is not already saturated by sponsorship. For a discussion on the ethics of ambush see here but the principle of opportunistic marketing is as fair and as old as marketing itself, and it translates perfectly online.
Take Pepsi’s recent ‘Refresh Everything’ campaign. They use similar branding to Obama’s election campaign to ask users to submit content to their site, ostensibly to be viewed by the new American president. With Obama’s huge current momentum, it is clear to see why a company would seek to align with him. To many people it will seem that Pepsi sponsor the President of the United States, at possibly the height of his popularity, despite them not making any official links at all.
So when you notice a trend gathering momentum, or when a major event comes around, find ways of utilising its mass appeal. Write a blog article about it. Put a picture of it on your site. Advertise strongly using images. Get users to submit content and discuss ideas on something they care about but on your terms, on your site, where you do have 100% sponsorship rights. Then, alongside traditional marketing, you are forging a positive connection between you and something your user base care about.
Taking the lessons of ambush marketing online can gain you all the benefits of official sponsorship at a fraction of the cost.
Mark
Multimedia Developer
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