Ambush Marketing of the London Olympics: A Content Analysis

Abstract

Global sporting events such as the Olympic Games attract significant amounts of sponsorship spend by companies that want to position their brands with such a high profile event. There are very few events that can achieve this on a truly global scale, but the Olympic Games are one of these events. However, it is also the case that these types of events attract ambush marketing as rival companies seek to have their brands associated with the Olympics, but at only a fraction of the cost. Ambush marketing has been termed associative marketing as the ambush marketer attempts to associate the brand with and event and trade off the goodwill associated with the event. Thus ambush marketing attempts to confuse the consumer into believing that the ambusher is a sponsor. Ambush marketing strategies include sponsoring media coverage of an event, sponsoring a sub-category of the event, consumer promotions, congratulatory messages, pourage agreements and corporate hospitality. However, Burton and Chadwick (2009) say ambush marketing has evolved, from mainly broadcast sponsorship campaigns and advertising at the events, to more creative and associative marketing efforts away from the event, to the use of spectators or fans to promote the brand.

Although ambush marketing of such an event is not necessarily new, the 2012 London Olympics presented an intriguing research scenario because firstly it had the strictest anti-ambush legislation and enforcement policies of any other previous Games. In an attempt to protect the extensive sponsorship spend (in excess of £3.7 billion) required to host the London Olympic Games, a total of 24 statutory instruments and five acts of Parliament were brought into being including bans on the use of numerous words associated with the Olympics, including ‘Games’, ‘2012’ and combinations of ‘Gold’, ‘Summer’, ‘Medals’, ‘safe zones’ where sponsors have sole rights and aggressive onsite policing. Ambush marketing is no longer just a civil matter but a criminal one. Such strict control measures had the potential to both alienate the public as well as lull the sponsors into a false sense of security. The second aspect making the London Olympics an interesting research event was the strong social media presence. These Games were even described as the ‘digital games’. This paper looks at how effective this legislation was in practice given the strong social media presence, by undertaking a content analysis on text extracted from Google using the key word search term ‘london olympics ambush marketing’. A search was done every day for a month before, and the time during the Olympics. For each period all the articles were then combined into a single word document. A total of 406 354 words (1108 pages) were included in the data set for the ‘before’ period and 413 433 words (1008 pages) in the ‘during’ set. Leximancer, text mining software used to analyse (thematically and semantically) the content of textual documents and produce conceptual maps, was used for the data analysis.

The Leximancer maps revealed that in the ‘month before’ analysis the main themes exhibit a strong focus on the highly regulated nature of the London Olympics and the extreme lengths that the IOC and LOCOG’s have gone to protect the official sponsors. The main themes during the Olympics while still emphasising the measures in place to protect the official sponsors, revealed an emergence of more discussion on the ambushers, with Nike and Dr Dre featuring prominently. Both these ambushers appear to have tiptoed around the IOC and LOCOG legislation and rules. The role of social media is highlighted. Comparing the data from the two periods, the research findings suggest that the legislation did curtail ambush marketing to some extent, although did not eliminate it. Despite concerns about a backlash from spectators and the possibility of negative publicity due to the strict controls, this did not appear to materialise. Furthermore, the nature of ambush marketing seems to have changed from a direct assault on the event, to more subtle ambushing techniques, also more difficult to predict. The hype surrounding the London Games as the ‘first truly’ digital Games, with the anticipated mass use of Social Media as an ambush medium of the Games did not materialise. This may have been due to the cooperation of the leading Social Media sites with Facebook banning advertising associated with the Games during the Olympics. Similarly, Twitter announced a ban any potential ambush tweets. The concept maps did pick up the theme of media for both before and during the Games with the central concept in both periods relating to Social Media. It is difficult to tell how effective the Games were for the official sponsors in terms of raising the profile of their brands. Only four brands were picked up by the concept maps, two official sponsors (Adidas and Coca Cola) and two unofficial sponsors (Nike and Beats). It would seem that sponsoring the Games does not get everyone talking about your brand. Limitations in this research are acknowledged.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.