Ambush marketing winning the brand battle at Euro 2016
Thursday 7 July 2016
As well as the competition taking place on the pitch, Euro 2016 has been notable for the battle of the brands. Official sponsors and those drawing attention to their brand unofficially have been vying for our attention.
So called ‘ambush marketing’ has been rife throughout the tournament and social media analysis carried out by academics at The University of Salford suggests it is at least as effective than that of the official sponsors, who have spent a small fortune. They lay out their main findings in an article published in the Conversation.
Alex Fenton, lecturer in Digital Business at the University of Salford said: “We have monitored the social media channels of the main sponsors and also those companies who have used the Euros for ambush marketing. We have found that some of the creative social media marketing activities by the ambush marketers have been significantly more effective at engaging people and capturing the interest of the public than those of the official sponsors. If you compare the budgets involved, some of the ambush marketers have achieved much higher engagement.”
One of the brands to benefit from this phenomenon is the supermarket chain Iceland. They signed a deal to sponsor the Iceland national side, which had qualified for a major tournament for the first time and beat England to reach the quarter finals, before being knocked out by France.
The #ComeOnIceland hashtag set up for this campaign has attracted a large volume of engagement on social media through the tournament. Bookmaker Paddy Power has also used social media effectively to ambush official sponsors on social media.
Sponsors such as Coca Cola, McDonalds, Hyundai and Carlsberg have spent multiple millions of pounds on official sponsorship but the findings raise question about whether they get value for money. They have to plan their marketing and tweets in advance and get them signed off, which means they lose the spontaneity which is so important to effective social media engagement.
For example Iceland’s #ComeOnIceland campaign had a much higher frequency of social media interactions, reaching 1500 Tweets in just 19 hours compared to Hyundai’s #RealFansFirst which took 163 hours to reach the same level of retweets.
Alex said: “Social media is now so vital for advertisers to engage with customers and using social media to engage fans in conversation and get them involved is key. Stale, uninspiring social media campaigns will not be effective, even if they are promoted on match hoardings and TV adverts.
“Reported figures from a spontaneous recognition survey showed, for instance, that while 11% of people correctly identified Adidas as an official sponsor, 9% incorrectly thought that Nike was one, too. MasterCard, another sponsor, had a similar problem with Visa.
“It can be difficult for official sponsors to compete with the unofficial marketing of these companies. There are strict guidelines, which are imposed by the organising committees, which can stifle innovation. These rules don’t apply to those agile companies, which are using ambush marketing.
“If major sports tournaments want to regain the upper hand in this brave new era, they may need to develop an approach suited to the innovation and instantaneousness of social media to create a conversation with fans. Until then they risk jeopardising their proposition – an own goal if ever there was one.”
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Sam Wood
0161 295 5361
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