Nothing official about it ambush

marketing, 1996
1996 saw the World Cup returning to the sub-continent. With it started the
war to woo a potentially huge Indian market. Though Coca Cola had
secured the rights as the official soft drink of the World Cup, rival
American giants PepsiCo weren't ready to surrender. They went on to steal
the thunder with their 'Nothing official about it' campaign. The instance
marks perhaps the most famous example of 'ambush marketing' in the
history of business related to sports in India. Later in 2002 the ICC sought
to introduce a clause for its future events to outlaw ambush marketing
and urged individual boards to take up the matter with their players on a
priority basis. Their contention was that they would not be able to
command sponsorships and thus feed money back unless official sponsors
are protected

Star network Hotstar VS Zee

Network DittoTV
Aug 2 2015
While companies taking dig at their rivals through ad campaigns is nothing new with colas, FMCG,
and lately even e-commerce space dominating brand wars, the phenomenon has of late caught up
with the digital entertainment arena as well.
While the Flipkart-Snapdeal duel is still fresh in memory, the credit for the first ad war in the digital
entertainment space should go to Star India's Hotstar and Zee's digital offering Ditto TV. This has
heated up the over-the-top (OTT) space with the latter taking a dig at the former in its latest ad
campaign.
Ditto in its latest ad asks 'Akele TV kaun dekhta hai yaar?' (Who watches TV alone?), clearly taking
potshots at Hotstar that encouraged people to go solo with its launch campaign.
"Consumer culture clearly is about enjoying entertaining content with the near and dear ones. Our
campaign essentially strives to reinforce entertainment consumption habit and seeks to make the
experience as seamless and anytime/anywhere as possible. And that's what the campaign strives to
highlight," Zee Digital Convergence Chief Executive Debashish Ghosh told PTI.
However, an e-mail sent to Star India remained unanswered.
As per Scarecrow Communications, which conceptualised the Ditto campaign, "in these app-based
products, the selling point is always personal space. But Ditto breaches the wall and talks about
consuming entertainment together. This has a potential to create a disruption in the category.

PepsiCo to sell packs of beverage and snacks during

FIFA World Cup sponsored by Coca-Cola, denies
ambush marketing
June 20 2014

PepsiCo India has lined up a promotional plan around the ongoing football World
Cup, which is officially sponsored by rival Coca-Cola. The company is tying up
with Mumbaibased, all-night delivery service Fly By Knight, which sells food,
cigarettes and condoms, to sell packs of beverages and snacks, dubbed the
'Perfect Consumption Match'.
The pack will include new flavours of wafer brand Lays apart from cans of Pepsi.
An official aware of the development said PepsiCo will promote the exercise on
social media and various Google channels.
A PepsiCo spokesman denied that this would amount to ambush marketing.
"PepsiCo is not a sponsor of Fifa, none of our campaigns are associated with the
tournament. For the past 15 years, we have been running annual football
programmes and the 2014 campaign is the latest," he said.
The Rs 80 packs will be available in some stores and through its after-hour
delivery partner in Gurgaon and Mumbai for now.
"Through our extended consumer research and social listening, latenight
snacking and TV watching is emerging as a great space that our brands can
appropriate to drive brand connect and consumption opportunity," the PepsiCo
spokesman said.
PepsiCo is leveraging the packs along with its global association with football
megastar Lionel Messi. "The 'Perfect Match' campaign reflects our strategy to
leverage our power of one portfolio of complementary food and beverage brands
and drive sales and is a part of a worldwide, integrated marketing campaign,"
the spokesman said.
Fly By Knight founder Neha Jain said demand was booming. "We are seeing a
spike in sales of almost 50% across all categories. Volumes on weekends are
much higher." The company has received a fresh round of funding by venture
capitalists and is looking to step up recruitment and roll out other services.
In the recent past, Coca-Cola sold beverages outside stadiums where the Indian
Premier League matches were being played. PepsiCo is official title sponsor of
the IPL.

Ambush marketing good for brands and consumers

Aug 5 2010
Not only is ambush marketing good for brands, it's better for consumers. If a
brand smashes through, thanks to wicked marketing, hurray! People don't see it
as unethical, unlike quibbling us, media and ad guys. For the people, it's exciting
advertising and radical thinking. All told; loud applause for the brand. Marketing
is unabashed war, with immediate profits to be won. No waiting. No watching.
Attack meekness. Plunder weakness. Deliver shock and awe.
Our businesses have mutated into the art of separating money from customers.
The writing is black. If you aren't considering ambush, someone will ambush your
brand.
In the HUL versus P&G instance, the latter played into the former's hands. It was
asking to be ambushed. Teasers the Pantene kind have long gone out of the
arsenal, and instead, surprise and timing are in.
Dove is now sharper, snappier and sassier. And as a consumer, I flushed boring
Pantene.
Let's face it, consumers love cheeky brands. Remember Pepsi's nothing official
about it? A masterstroke that made Pepsi younger, and reinforced its maverick
brand attitude.
While Davids will win hearts when they keel Goliaths over, ambush marketing
isn't something big brands cannot do. They must. It makes a brand come alive. It
gets a new energy. It engages people. And it gives them a lot to talk, plenty to
chat, enough to SMS.
Today, with the help of technology, ambush ideas will be instant and deadly. A
brand can be a made or ridiculed overnight.
It's all about being clever, being contemporary, and being able to deliver
visibility, relevance and magnetism.
Despite 360 degrees of brand fortification, and with every competitive brand
blatantly plagiarizing products and technologies, sabotaging each other is no
longer sacrilege.

It's cool actually. And it rocks the imagination of the consumers. With 60% of
India below 30 years, old fogey advertising better get in some new spunk to ram
down the walls of our youth.
One last nail. If ambush marketing isn't a brand-building idea, why are more
brands getting into it? And why on earth is Nike just doing it again and again?

Ambush marketing: The high of churning out an ad in

less than a day
Mar 19 2014
Ambush marketing means different things to different people. Let's first get the
pedantic definition out of the way: riding on a rival brand's ad, event or
positioning to create publicity for one's own brand. To marketers, it's a huge punt
that may give their brands attention and make the competition look duller by
comparison. To the sales department, it's yet another expense that may or may
not reflect on the topline. But to the agency creative it's nothing short of a high;
the intoxicating rush of thinking on their feet, churning something out in less
than a day instead of the standard six week deadline.
First off, it's not like a plain vanilla release. Creatives claim they can't sleep the
night before, waiting for the nation to wake up and react. Like the time people
woke to a Dove hoarding on the morning of July 28, 2010. The hoardings were
positioned in the vicinity of a Pantene teaser campaign for "a mystery shampoo"
and simply said "There's no mystery, Dove is the No 1 shampoo." "When you're
working on an ambush campaign," says Zenobia Pithawalla, ECD Ogilvy Mumbai
(who spearheads team Dove), "the feelings are generally mixed." It is the thrill of
doing something wicked albeit with a bit of guilt as someone else's campaign
becomes the brief for your brand (and invariably the butt of your joke). What

you're doing may not be cent per cent right but you just can't wait to do it, she
shares.
A year later, the 'Have I Made It Large' campaign featured an uncharacteristically
pensive Harbhajan Singh pondering on how ephemeral accomplishment is for
Royal Stag. It was rudely deflated by a near frame by frame parody from DDB
Mudra for McDowell's. The ads have been joined at the hip by an enterprising
YouTube user and the latter invariably gets the laughs. To Bobby Pawar, CCO South Asia at Publicis Worldwide, who wrote the ad, there was no better joy than
making "ridiculous fun" of an ad that he thought went on the holier than thou
path. "When something is visibly deep and pompous, it simply opens the door a
little bit. All that's left for you to do is just kick it down," Pawar says. There was
no adequate brief except to take a shot at how pretentious the ad was, he
recounts. There was no logic to what they did, he adds, because if they tried to
be logical while subverting the Royal Stag ad, they'd have made a mockery of
themselves.
And last year, Dettol riffed on Vim bar, by saying that it wasn't just capable of
cleaning, it also killed germs in the process; something that the category leader,
never made a claim to. Says Satbir Singh, CCO of Havas Worldwide (Dettol's
creative agency), "Ambush advertising garners a huge portion of mindspace in a
short time, something that helps when you're establishing a new brand and
repositioning its biggest competitor to position yourself by demonstrating how
you're better." Personally, he muses, every writer who loves his job would enjoy a
slanging match as long as it is good natured and stays civilised.

That is if it's allowed to get off the ground in the first place. Ambushes have always been infrequent
because of the several legal elements that come into the picture. Second, you need to either have a
strong claim or a clear and provable superiority over the player you're ambushing. Brands have
threatened each other with legal action for playing the 'Mine is better than yours' card; for instance
Eureka Forbes and Hindustan Unilever in the water purifiers category. So weigh the consequences
before you run down your rival. And remember, while everyone likes the occasionally cocky and
irreverent jester, no one likes a bully.

Brand police takes over London to save sponsors

July 17 2012
Hundreds of uniformed Olympics officers will begin touring the country today
enforcing sponsors' multimillion-pound marketing deals, in a highly organised
mission that contrasts with the scramble to find enough staff to secure Olympic
sites.
Almost 300 enforcement officers will be seen across the country checking firms
to ensure they are not staging "ambush marketing" or illegally associating
themselves with the Games at the expense of official sponsors such as Adidas,
McDonald's, Coca-Cola and BP. The clampdown goes on while 3,500 soldiers on
leave are brought in to bail out the security firm G4S which admitted it could not
supply the numbers of security staff it had promised.
Yesterday, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, refused to rule out that even
more soldiers may be called upon to help with security, but dismissed the issue
as merely a "hitch". However, as well as the regular Army, the Olympic "brand
army" will start its work with a vengeance today.
Wearing purple caps and tops, the experts in trading and advertising working for
the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) are heading the biggest brand protection
operation staged in the UK. Under legislation specially introduced for the London
Games, they have the right to enter shops and offices and bring court action with
fines of up to (pounds sterling)20,000.
Olympics organisers have warned businesses that during London 2012 their
advertising should not include a list of banned words, including "gold", "silver"
and "bronze", "summer", "sponsors" and "London".
Publicans have been advised that blackboards advertising live TV coverage must
not refer to beer brands or brewers without an Olympics deal, while caterers and
restaurateurs have been told not to advertise dishes that could be construed as
having an association with the event.
At the 40 Olympics venues, 800 retailers have been banned from serving chips
to avoid infringing fast-food rights secured by McDonald's.

Marina Palomba, for the McCann Worldgroup agency in London, described the
rules as "the most draconian law in advance of an Olympic Games ever". The
ODA and Locog (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) say the
rules are necessary to protect brands.
"These rights are acquired by companies who invest millions of pounds to help
support the staging of the Games," Locog said. "People who seek the same
benefits for free - by engaging in ambush marketing or producing counterfeit
goods - are effectively depriving the Games of revenue."
Some (pounds sterling)1.4bn of the Games' (pounds sterling)11.4bn budget
comes from private sector sponsors. The International Olympic Committee's 11
global partners, including Coca-Cola, Visa and Proctor & Gamble, are contributing
(pounds sterling)700m while (pounds sterling)700m comes from London 2012
partners, including Adidas, BT, EDF, and Lloyds TSB.
The scale of the brand enforcement squad is nonetheless likely to intensify
criticism that the Olympics has become too corporate.? Paul Jordan, an expert in
brand protection at Bristows solicitors who advises firms on the rules, said they
were almost certainly tougher than at previous Olympics. "No other brands would
have people walking the streets being their eyes and ears, protecting their
interests," he said.
A spokesman for the Olympic Delivery Authority, whose team of 286
enforcement officers have been seconded from 30 local councils, said it had a
duty to ensure businesses were meeting the rules.

Samsung ambushes Nokia in smartphone war

Jan 20 2012
In a packed theatre, scores of excited movie buffs sat through a long march of
commercials patiently, but the organisers were dismayed. It was an exclusive
premier of SRK-starrer Ra.One for mobile phone maker Nokia's premium users at
PVR Select City Walk mall in Delhi, but the advertisements that had been running
for the previous few minutes were of Samsung mobile!
That was in October. Two months later, when Nokia rolled out Lumia cabs in
Bangalore as part of its biggest marketing drive in the country to promote its first
Windows smartphone, Samsung brought out its own Omnia cab and stationed it
outside the Lumia showroom for a few days.
Analysts call it ambush marketing, Samsung says it's not. Whatever, but the cutthroat competition between the country's top two mobile handset players looks
like the old Cola War between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and refreshes memories of

Pepsi's 'Nothing official about it' campaign during the 1996 cricket World Cup
that introduced the concept of ambush marketing in India.
"We do not acknowledge, react or engage in ambush marketing," a Nokia
spokesperson says. "We believe in responsible marketing, where we will disclose
more than what is required to our consumers, as we did in the case of the minor
software glitch in Lumia 800."
Samsung denies ambushing Nokia, and says both the examples were part of
independent marketing initiatives. "We were running a media innovation in
October for tablets wherein all screens at Ambience Mall PVR and Inox in Mumbai
showed the ads," a Samsung spokeswoman says.
Samsung Move Won't Affect Nokia
And there was no 'Lumia Cab' in Bangalore when Samsung rolled out a convoy of
'Omnia W' cabs for three days, she says, adding they were parked outside
Samsung Smartphone Cafes.
"Ambush marketing rules apply if there are territorial rules that are applicable, as
in the case of cricket World Cup... In the case of smartphones, all companies are
aggressively trying to grow the category," she says.
ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE & WAR
Samsung has emerged the most aggressive mobile handset maker over the past
couple of years. It pipped Apple as the world's top smartphone player during the
July-September quarter last year and in India, GfK data suggests Samsung may
have already overtaken Nokia as the largest smartphone vendor in value terms,
thanks to the rising popularity of its Google Android phones led by the Galaxy
range.
The marketing war in India has intensified after Nokia rolled out its first Windowsbased smartphone, Lumia, last month. Samsung has started pushing its own
Windows smartphone Omnia, launched more than a year ago, harder.
An email comparing Lumia 800 and Omnia W features and concluding 'Why
donate 9,000 extra to Nokia' is in circulation. While Samsung denies any
connection with the mail, Nokia says ambush marketing is not about deriding the
other brand. "Ambush marketing, if done in a creative manner, appeals to the
consumers," says a Nokia spokesperson. "It's not a crude attack on the rival."
Some marketing experts believe Samsung is playing it smart. "Competition is all
about being opportunistic and scoring a goal when the rival is least prepared.
And that's where Samsung has proved to be a better player," says Saurabh
Uboweja, director of brand consulting and design firm Brands of Desire.
Even if customers think Samsung played the smart Alec, it won't hurt the brand
as the ambush creates the perception of a smart, witty and on-the-go brand,
says Uboweja.

"It's much like the customers today who don't feel guilty about pulling a leg or
playing a prank on their peers," he adds.
RULES OF AMBUSH
Former advertising professional and chick lit writer Anuja Chauhan says focused
ambushing is better than rapid-fire ambushing. "It makes more sense to keep it
(ambush) more informative and publicise it," says Chauhan, who came up with
the 'Nothing official about it' tagline for Pepsi in 1996.
The aim of the ambush is to leverage the strength of the competitor. It has to be
smart and not say derogatory things about the competitor, she says. An
independent analyst says Samsung's strategy won't affect Nokia.
"Even in a war, ambush is the recourse of an upstart, and not of the ruler," says
the analyst, requesting anonymity. "At best, ambush can be a tactical move. But
it won't hurt Nokia."
YLR Moorthi, professor (marketing), IIM-Bangalore, says ambush marketing
somehow speaks of a company not confident of holding out in the open.
"Samsung is a challenger in the mobile market in India. So, they might be
seeking out opportunities to hurt Nokia," he says.
And it has managed to bridge the gap with Nokia considerably in the smartphone
segment, which accounts for some 8% of the 213-million Indian handset market.
According to latest IDC figures, Nokia accounted for 35.3% of all smartphone
shipments in the country during the July-September quarter last year, followed
by Samsung at 26%.
In the overall mobile phone market, the market shares are 31.8% and 17.5%,
respectively, for Nokia and Samsung. Deepak Kumar, research director
(telecommunications & mobile phones) at IDC India, says the smartphone
landscape in India will remain fluid for the next couple of quarters.

ICC probing Sony's campaign for Bravia TV as

ambush marketing
Feb 14 2011
A high-visibility print campaign and hoardings by Sony featuring India cricket
captain MS Dhoni has landed in controversy just days before the start of the
world cup, with the International Cricket Council checking out if it is a case of
ambush marketing. The campaign, that shows Dhoni playing cricket in blue
clothes, has not gone down well with the ICC, which has laid down strict
guidelines for protecting its sponsors against any form of ambush marketing ,
two officials close to the developments told ET. The advertisements promote
Sony's high-definition televisions.

The country's top consumer electronics company LG India is the official world
cup sponsor for consumer durables. "The ICC is discussing the matter with Sony
India, the BCCI (Indian cricket board) and the cricketer's managers," said one of
the officials working closely with ICC on sponsorship rights. "It seems to be a
borderline case of ambush marketing," said the person , requesting anonymity.
As per ICC guidelines against ambush marketing, only official sponsors can show
cricketers participating in the tournament in team colours and official gear.