In the months leading up to the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand that kicked off on Sept. 9 and finishes up this Sunday with a final match between the host country and France, the organizers did everything imaginable to be extra doubly sure that there wouldn’t be one itty bitty ounce of ambush marketing that took place at the festivities. Event organizers went so far to protect sponsors of the event, it felt like other types of security might be falling by the wayside.

Other than a few brochures handed out in the “clean zone” around one arena by scantily clad gals from a strip bar in Wellington, so far, so good. No crazy ambushes like the 36 orange-clad women one Dutch brewery sent to a World Cup game in South Africa to get the brand’s name into the minds of millions without spending the millions that Budweiser did to sponsor the event. Or even peaceful ones like the free hot-chocolate truck at the Vancouver Winter Olympics run by a rival credit-card company to event sponsor Visa. 

At least Rugby World Cup sponsor Heineken must be happy because it just announced that it was going to throw more cash in and extend its sponsorship to the 2015 RWC in England.Continue reading...

When the FIFA World Cup, one of the sporting world’s largest events, went to South Africa last year, it generated $1.1 billion in marketing income for the organizing body, according to Bloomberg.

FIFA will continue to cash in some of those bucks from the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, which has signed on to continue its 25-year relationship with the organization through the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the 2022 Cup in Qatar.

For those of you keeping score at home, this means that you’ll get to see commercials proclaiming that Budweiser is the “Official Beer of the FIFA World Cup” for the ninth and tenth time during those events.Continue reading...

The Denver Broncos lost their first game of the season, 23-20, to the Oakland Raiders and now head into a Week 2 matchup with the Cincinnati Bengals. The team hasn’t made the playoffs since 2005 and it is already not looking very good for the team to get there again this season.

This past July, the Broncos reportedly tried to trade quarterback Kyle Orton to the Dolphins and make backup Tim Tebow the starter. But the trade fell through and Tebow, a fan favorite of many in Denver who was selected in the first round of the 2010 NFL draft, was left as a benchwarmer. 

The Denver Post reports that eight friends pooled the money that they’d been saving up for tickets to the Super Bowl and put it toward two billboards with text to implore Broncos Coach John Fox to start Tebow instead of Orton, who has been the team’s starter since being traded to the Broncs from the Chicago Bears in 2009. "We believe in Coach Fox. We're just tired of Kyle Orton," said fan Jesse Oaks. "We were sitting around after Fox said he didn't hear the chants for (Tim) Tebow (during the loss to the Raiders) and we figured if he's deaf, we hope he's not blind."

After posting his idea on a Broncos message board, Oaks said that hundreds of other people offered to chip in cash to help defray the $10,000 of buying the billboards, which went up in late September. "It just feels like we're a team that's settling for mediocrity," Oaks said. "We're not blind. We know when we see good football.”

Well, it appears the coach was listening — Tebow is now the starting quarterback for the Broncos.

In the professional sports world, it's pretty easy to identify who's up and who's down by whether they win or lose. But when it comes to the actual value of a sports brand, winning has a different definition: It's based on the revenue a sports team or an individual athlete generates.

Forbes magazine has been analyzing the value of sports brands for three years now. The latest edition of the "Forbes Fab 40" values the top ten names in sports in four distinct categories: athletes, teams, events and businesses.

Leading the list of money-making athletes is the famous (and more recently infamous) Tiger Woods, whose brand is on the comeback trail with this week's major endorsement by Rolex.Continue reading...

Budweiser is hoping to put the "win" back in "Winnipeg" by rallying fan support for Canada's latest NHL franchise.

Canada has plenty of good beers of its own but the nation’s latest entry into the NHL, the new version of the Winnipeg Jets, will have a beer sponsorship that couldn’t get more American: Budweiser.Continue reading...

While it's unclear whether Kobe Bryant will play for the Italian basketball league, that hasn't stopped Nike — #25 on Interbrand's just-released 2011 Best Global Brands ranking — from releasing the commercial above, featuring the NBA star in Milan.

Today is considered a "huge day" for the lockout negotiations, with NBA team execs and players holed up in a swank hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to try to hash out a new collective bargaining agreement and end the current lockout.Continue reading...

The Rugby World Cup that is currently underway in New Zealand has set new precedents in its attempts to scare off and stop ambush marketing of any sort. 

The next big event to step up and try to show how it’s going to crush ambush marketers of all stripes will be the 2012 London Olympics (the unfortunately numbered XXX games, though you understandably won’t find that anywhere on London’s Olympic website). 

“A proposed amendment to the Olympics Act 2006, due to come before Parliament by the end of this year, will reverse the customary burden of proof in criminal cases,” Marketing Magazine reports. “Senior marketers could therefore be found guilty of an offence unless they can prove that ambush activity for their brand took place without their knowledge, or that they took reasonable steps to prevent it.”

After all, in such a financially strapped world, big events such as these are attempting to protect the investment of the corporations that actually shell out the big bucks to be corporate sponsors rather than the creative, lower-cost marketers who are trying to sneak in publicity, whether it’s through skywriting, streakers, or women in matching orange outfits.

“The extraordinary derogation from the normal position could also catch out directors of official sponsors whose staff or agencies overstep the strict letter of their sponsor rights,” said Nick Johnson, partner at law firm Osborne Clarke, Marketing Magazine reports.

Let’s hope the law is as tough on actual ambushers as it is on sneaky advertisers.

NBA owners and players are trying to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. So far, training camps and some preseason games have been canceled, but the constant threat of the entire season getting flushed down the drain hangs over things. One team that might actually benefit from such a thing could be the New Jersey Nets.

The Nets are spending the season in Newark before moving to Brooklyn. A year off could help new fans forget that the team has been one of the more forgettable franchises in recent years. One little tool that the team isn’t using to help people move on from the recent past is a new name.

Mogul/rapper and minority team owner Jay-Z, a Brooklyn native, announced Monday that the team’s name will stay Nets. His other big announcement, which was made overlooking the under-construction Barclays Center, is that the arena will open in September 2012 with a series of eight concerts by him before the opening tipoff of the Brooklyn Nets season.Continue reading...