International Law

Those Clever Ambush Marketers

By Stan

A New York Times reporter discusses his facility tour of sportswear company Li-Ning, including the interesting Olympics-themed posters on the wall:

[M]ost of the posters feature Olympians who have endorsement deals with the company, including the United States table tennis team and dozens of Chinese athletes who will be hurdling and diving and somersaulting in Li-Ning gear during the Games. And there was that poster of . . . well, I couldn’t say. It showed a dozen or so people, some middle-aged, some sporting small paunches, standing in a semi-circle, modeling yellow sports jackets with the Li-Ning logo. They sure weren’t Olympic athletes.

“They are the famous broadcasters for CCTV-5,” my tour guide, a young Li-Ning executive, told me. He was talking about the sports channel of China Central Television, the country’s state-run network; the people in the poster will be broadcasting the Olympic Games. Almost giddily, my guide explained that the company had cut a deal with CCTV-5 to dress its sportscasters for the Games.

In other words, whenever Chinese viewers watch the Games on TV, they will be unable to avoid Li-Ning’s logo. “Pretty clever, isn’t it?” my guide said, breaking into a smile.

It is, indeed, given that Li-Ning is not an official Olympic sponsor.

Busted! I wonder if being called out for ambush marketing will hurt Li-Ning? Will the Beijing Olympic committee be placing a call to Li-Ning and asking exactly what the heck they’re thinking? Is someone going to get in the face of the people at CCTV-5?

This is exactly the kind of thing that the IOC and its local counterpart in Beijing, BOCOG, was trying to avoid. By all accounts, incidents of ambush marketing have been kept down fairly well to this point. This one is rather blatant, though. Don’t tell anyone, but I secretly respect the sheer cleverness, not to mention chutzpah, of some ambush marketers.

Gotta keep my eye on this one.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on June 03, 2008 (boomark / email).