As the “Golden Generation” of England footballers bid for the umpteenth (and probably last) time to realise their potential at a major international tournament, fans across the country will be reaching for their Three Lions replica shirts, keeping their fingers crossed, and praying that “Wazza” really can Write The Future.

Back to the present. Before a fly-away Jabulani ball has been struck in earnest, the contest between “official sponsors” and those pesky ambushers has truly kicked off. The FA and Mars, an official partner of the England Team, are reportedly considering legal action against Nestlé, for “passing off” an association with the England team through Kit Kat’s “Fingers Crossed” campaign. Yes, this is the same Mars who undertook the infamous “Believe” ambush marketing campaign around the 2006 World Cup. For 2010, and the first football World Cup on African soil, a classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper.

Three questions, one for each lion on John Barnes’s Mars Bar :

1. Is Nestlé actually passing off an association with the England team?

This should probably be left to the lawyers, but from a layman’s / sport industry professional’s perspective, using Sol Campbell and Mansfield Town manager David Holdsworth as your “talent” is not the best way to infer an association with the England team. And despite the well observed allusions to England’s World Cup heritage – “cross your fingers for no penalties…no broken metatarsals…no tears” -and liberal use of the ambusher’s best friend (the St George’s flag), nothing suggests that Kit Kat sponsors Capello’s boys.

2. Should Mars be trying to protect their hard bought status as the England Team’s confectionary brand of choice?

A lesson for all official sponsors. Complain about the ambushers and you are giving their campaigns the oxygen of publicity. Mars clearly had good reason to turn gamekeeper and pay for the privilege of England partner status. They should be confident that their association, leveraged properly, will pay off. Otherwise, why not remain a poacher?

3. Whose current World Cup campaign is better?

No contest. Kit Kat have tapped into the very essence of the English sporting psyche, and the pervading sense of hope over expectation that grips every England football fan during international football tournaments. Their TV ad brings that insight to life in a down to earth, domestic football environment. Compare that with John Barnes re-hashing a song from 1990 in a sparsely populated park, with production values that suggest too much money in the FA’s coffers and not enough in the activation pot.

Reports suggest that Mars may have won the battle of the lawyers, and that Nestlé have agreed to curtail the campaign. Is that the final whistle on this contest? Probably not if Kit Kat’s PR team are on the ball. What price England players crossing their fingers during a crucial penalty shoot, or being caught on camera tucking into one of the 200 Kit Kat’s that have been delivered to the England training camp by the FA’s official supermarket …?

Whatever happens, fingers crossed that 2010 marks the end of John Barnes’s singing career.

By Tom Gladstone on June 11th, 2010

Tags: Advertising, Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Communications, Content, Football, Football Sponsorship, Media, Public relations, Social Media, Sponsorship, Sport

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Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

- Ferris Bueller

Sentiments borne of teenage frustration and a need for escape, rebellion and self-expression from the master of the ‘80s genre, the late great John Hughes. A simpler time, one might argue: the days before the web, wi-fi, information aggregation and real-time status updates live-streamed from a virtual community of billions.

Nowadays, information overload is well-documented, but to put things into context, it’s worth reviewing a snippet of the review of web use in 2009 from the legends at Pingdom.

So, in 2009:

- 90 trillion emails were sent…of which 81% were classified as spam (that’s 200 billion mails a day)
- A total of 234 billion websites were catalogued…with a further 47 million added last year
- There were 1.73 billion internet users worldwide…an 18% increase on 2008
- 126 million blogs were tracked by BlogPulse…with 84% of social network sites with more women than men
- Microblogs weighed in with a hefty 27.3 million tweets per day…although 57% of Twitter’s user base is in the US
- Facebook reached 350m users…50% of whom logged on every day
- 4 billion images were hosted on Flickr…however, 2.5 billion per month were uploaded to Facebook
- 1 billion videos were viewed per day on You Tube…with the average user watching 182 videos per month

And breathe.

In an age where the relentless pace of technological change means that many of us feel like we’re running to stand still, how do we find the time to stand and stare? If only there was some kind of machine that could take you back, pre-tipping point, or at least let you remember what things once looked and felt like…

You’ll be needing the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Whether it’s for research, curiosity or simple nostalgia, this is a really fascinating resource. Type in whatever website you’re interested in and the site will offer you glimpses of archived pages from as far back as the mid ‘90s.

Just to get you started, how about:

Hotmail circa 1997

Google circa 1998

BBC.co.uk circa 2000

Sky Sport circa 2001

You Tube circa 2005

Granted, hardware, software and coding changes mean that not every page works perfectly or looks exactly as it used to. However, it’s a great way of frittering away a couple of minutes online, and even acts as a would-be stomach pump for the reclamation of forgotten morsels of data that Google, like a virtual sarlacc, has swallowed up but is now unable to regurgitate via organic search, such is the ceaseless growth of cyberspace.

Whether you find what you’re looking for or not, such online time travel confirms that LP Hartley knew what he was talking about…the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

By Jonathan Izzard on April 12th, 2010

Tags: Blogging, Content, Default, Facebook, Media, Online communities, YouTube, community

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