The stand-out performer on the track at this week’s World Athletics Championships in Berlin has of course been the astonishing Usain Bolt. Off the track, his sponsors Puma have also demolished the opposition in the marketing contest (albeit that Puma had little to beat, given the complete lack of activation by the various event sponsors) with a funny, savvy, multi-platform campaign which is right up there with anything produced by the category titans, adidas and Nike.

The inspiration for the campaign was gifted to Puma:  the fact that fans and the media incessantly request that Bolt reprise his trademark ’arms pointing skyward’ pose from the Beijing Olympics wherever he goes. Puma’s inspired twist? A ’solution’ to the problem, developed after ‘a year of research and development’, in the shape of strap-on foam ‘Bolt Arms’.

“From now on, they do the pose”, says Bolt, at a fake but cleverly-rendered press conference included in a number of virals released as part of the Puma campaign, which is notable for its integrated use of social media platforms.

Cue from there a blitz of experiential activity in Berlin, including mass distribution of the Arms to fans, leading to an inevitable decision by the IAAF (sports equipment sponsor: adidas) to ban fans from wearing ‘Bolt Arms’ in the stadium - prompting Puma to ask fans via Twitter if anyone managed to sneak them inside, which they clearly did judging by numerous TV crowd shots.

All in all an exemplary case study, and to my mind a contender for campaign of the year.

By Tim Crow on August 21st, 2009

Tags: Ambush campaign, Athletics, Beijing 2008, Default, Digital marketing, Viral Marketing

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Ever thought about naming a star? How about owning a nice plot of land on the dark side of the Moon? Fancy sponsoring a three-toed sloth in Costa Rica?

As PT Barnum famously never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute” – applying Newton’s Third Law (he’ll now be spinning in his Westminster Abbey sarcophagus) would suggest an equal and opposite reaction. After all, you only know you’re a mark once you’ve been conned, right? Therefore every sap needs a swindler, and in today’s society, there always seems to be someone out there ready to sell you something:

a) That isn’t theirs to flog

b) The customer can never really own

c) With strong virtual but low actual value

So it’s nice to see a company turning the tables on the snake oil salesmen and scammers: why buy something that’s worth nothing, when you can use something that costs nothing?

The company in question is Intel, whose 2009 ATL campaign, set to roll out over the next three years, sees the technology giant using the sign-off “Sponsors of Tomorrow”. I mean, who’s going to monetise ‘Tomorrow’…Annie?

It’s interesting that Intel should be using the collective plural ‘sponsors’ here, a move, in line with the content of their ATL, to both humanise the company and express the broad range of areas across which it – I mean ‘they’ – work.

Neatly turning things on their head, the campaign is less ‘Intel Inside’, and more ‘Inside Intel’. The execution below might aim at geek-chic, but it also emphasises who makes up the company, not just what the company makes.

You’ll notice that even the brand-defining/ubiquitous/maddeningly annoying Intel ‘chimes’ are now performed in the new ads by company employees (okay, the actors portraying company employees), reminding us of a company’s most important asset – its people.

As “Sponsors of Tomorrow”, the casual perspective of Intel being just a sticker on your PC may have had its chips.

By Jonathan Izzard on June 12th, 2009

Tags: Advertising, Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Branded content, Digital marketing, Employee engagement, Media, New Product Development, Sales promotion, Sponsorship, Viral Marketing

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There are few things more irritating than a tube strike - probably only Wales losing at rugby for me - but I do like to see a brand making the most of a bad situation.  My good friends at Streetcar, a pay-as-you-go car share scheme, have just sent a great little email to offer a discount to all members who may be stranded at work because of the latest tube chaos.

By Ben Wilkinson on June 10th, 2009

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Digital marketing, Public relations, Sales promotion, Viral Marketing

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This morning Twitter alerted me to a quite brilliant piece of advertising in the USA.  Audi is running a national ad campaign featuring their new A4.  The ad, on the left hand side of the steet in the image below, features the tag line “Your move, BMW.”  In a fantastic riposte, a local BMW dealer has bought the billboard opposite featuring an M3 ad with the comeback strap line of “Checkmate“. Fabulous.

Checkmate

By Ben Wilkinson on April 16th, 2009

Tags: Advertising, Ambush campaign, Sales promotion

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SA Brain beer brand has once again struck inspired marketing gold in their efforts to evade France’s alcohol ban in sponsorship and advertising.

Since the marketing genius of SA dreamt up the replacement of ‘Brawn’ for ‘Brains’ when the Welsh side played in Paris in 2005, the brand has become known for its clever avoidance of the stringent French marketing rules.

In this year’s RBS 6 Nations, Wales once again travel to Stade de France for the first Friday night game that the Tournament has ever had, on 27th February. And when they take to the field, this is what the boys in red will be sporting across their chests:

This has the double effect of ‘essai’ translating as ‘try’ in French, and spoken aloud it is an invitation to ‘try’ Welsh beer brand ‘SA’.

Nice.

By Lucie Bartlett on February 17th, 2009

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Rugby, Sponsorship

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Following up on Tim’s blog about brands hijacking the Inauguration, the stack of Presidential-based ads running in the press the next day showed, for the most part, that the creatives didn’t fluff their lines.

Our favourite though, appeared in the Aussie Daily Telegraph. Hats off to Veet for showing that simplicity is always best.

By Dominic Curran on January 23rd, 2009

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Default

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Barack Obama may have decided against signing corporate sponsors to help fund the estimated $40m costs of official events around his inauguration, but brands are deploying an array of marketing techniques to attempt to gatecrash the moment.  Here’s a selection.

IKEA has led on experiential, via a mock motorcade touring Washington DC and an IKEA-furnished virtual Oval Office in Washington’s Grand Union station. The latter is replicated online at embracechange09.com, where consumers can add virtual IKEA furniture to the Oval Office and send their suggestions to both their friends and the White House.

Dunkin’ Donuts are selling red-white-and-blue-sprinkled ‘Stars & Stripes’ doughnuts in the chain’s stores nationwide from for 89 cents during inauguration week, and the brand’s blogger, Dunkin’ Dave, is pushing the initiative on Twitter.

Honest Tea, who struck marketing gold when Obama was seen drinking its Black Forest Berry tea on the campaign trail, has launched a limited-edition range renamed “Barack Forest Berry”, and will be sampling around DC all week.

And Audi of America is going seriously big with a raft of broadcast, online and print sponsorship initiatives, including an unprecedented broadcast sponsorship of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news bulletins on inauguration evening, all to launch a year-long ‘Celebration of Progress’.

By Tim Crow on January 19th, 2009

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Branded content, Broadcast sponsorship, Default, Experiential marketing, Media, New Product Development, Product placement, Sales promotion, Sponsorship, Television

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It’s good to see that UK Sport and LOCOG are taking Medal Hopes over, and back to the drawing board.  As I wrote back in August when it first surfaced, Medal Hopes was clearly a flawed concept that needed a radical re-think.

I wasn’t alone. Peter King, CEO of British Cycling, was quoted by the Evening Standard as follows after listening to a Medal Hopes briefing by Culture Secretary Andy Burnham:   

“I don’t think it will work - it’s an absolute non-starter. Even if it does generate income it will not generate £79million. Athletes are supposed to give three days of their time (per year) to support the lottery programmes. But it will be an extra demand on their time and there will be conflicts of interest between athletes’ own sponsors, their governing bodies’ sponsors and the sponsors of the Medal Hopes scheme.”

The mystery is why it took DCMS and Fast Track over two years to come up with something that would be so obviously problematic and unpopular.

Now, with UK Sport leading, and LOCOG advising, the global and domestic sponsors of London 2012 will be reassured that whatever finally reaches the market will not dilute and ambush the Olympic sponsors’ territory in the way that Medal Hopes was clearly going to.

Indeed I hope that UK Sport will explore non-sponsorship solutions, and take inspiration from innovations which others have already created to fund the Olympics without ambushing it, such as Team Business West Midlands, BeNumber 1 and the Vancouver 2010 Patrons Programme. 

They could also look at why it is that our Olympic athletes’ contractual appearances for the National Lottery are, as The Times’ Olympic Correspondent Ashling O’Connor revealed recently, ‘rarely used’, and how they might be used to drive additional funding via the Lottery rather than being re-sold as part of Medal Hopes.

By Tim Crow on December 4th, 2008

Tags: Ambush campaign, DCMS, Default, London 2012, London 2012 sponsorship, London 2012 sponsorship consultants, Olympic sponsorship, Olympics, Sponsorship, Team GB

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Euro 2008 kicks off this weekend without England or Scotland, but clichéd commentaries about lower fan interest and less brand activity miss the point that for brand marketers who use football, there are still valuable lessons to be learned from the tournament – many of which couldn’t be learned if the home teams had qualified.By the same token, ambush activity will also be thrown into higher relief, whether big, bold and obviously strategic such as the Mars ‘Get Britain Playing’ campaign or Burger King’s ‘Football Your Way’, to the tactical, such as Heineken’s new, and very funny, press work - although we suspect that UEFA and tournament sponsor Carlsberg will be less than amused given Heineken’s status as a UEFA Champions League sponsor.
 

Finally, let’s not forget that Euro 2008 will do quite nicely without the home teams. Every one of the 1.05 million match tickets has been sold - albeit only 33 per cent direct to the fans - and in football terms it will be as good as it gets: the 2006 World Cup Final was between France and Italy.

From fan consumption across a variety of channels for example, we’ll discover how many fans here love football no matter who’s playing, as distinct from those who, as Martin Samuel put it recently in The Times, are in love not with football but with:

‘a St George’s Cross [on] the car aerial, buying the new red England shirt and joining the gang for a month.’

Tournament sponsors, many of them brands with long term football agendas, will also gain a much clearer perspective on how powerfully their campaigns cut through to the hardcore fan audience, undiluted either by the casual St George’s Cross fan or the blizzard of ambush campaigns that would normally accompany a big tournament featuring the home teams.

 

 

By Tim Crow on June 6th, 2008

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Euro 2008, Football

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