If you had asked me a fortnight ago if I had heard of Bavaria (the brewery not the region) I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, nor, I imagine, would a great many other people. Ask anyone now though (well, world cup followers at any rate) and they could probably tell you that they are the brewery that performed a very cheeky piece of ambush marketing involving 36 Dutch women in short orange dresses using ITV pundit Robbie Earle’s ticket allocation for the Holland V Denmark game. It is an example of a very successful attempt at ambush marketing. But this might not have been the case if FIFA hadn’t brought in the heavies.

FIFA, and all other organisers of big events, is bound to protect the advertising investments of official sponsors. This is not only for the benefit of the sponsors, but also for FIFA – if they didn’t actively attempt to protect advertisers then nobody in their right mind would want to spend millions to become an official sponsor

The big mistake that FIFA made was to publicise the fact that they had ejected the ambush marketers and launched a civil lawsuit against Bavaria. This is exactly what Bavaria wanted to achieve – free publicity. If FIFA had quietly ejected the women and issued proceedings with little fanfare the ambush marketing attempt would have been far less successful – instead they have generated hundreds of column inches for the brand globally.

(For example, New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, BBC, New Zealand Herald, USA Today, AFP and The Guardian)

The fines faced by Bavaria will probably end up much cheaper than an official sponsorship and the whole affair will have netted a significant amount of attention, a bargain at twice the price perhaps?

(picture source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/4671127352/ – user osde8info)