Rugby World Cup Tackles Ambush Marketing

The Rugby World Cup is being held in New Zealand from Sept. 9 to October 23 — and the country is going to do everything it can to stop ambush marketing, including possibly enforcing no-fly zones during matches.

The Southland Times reports that New Zealand’s Ministry of Economic Development will send out a team of enforcement officers to each city where there are matches to watch out for potential ambush marketing — a hallmark of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, as some may recall.

"It shows the power of branding, how seriously branding is now taken in the modern commercial world and the treachery that goes into trying to get around it,” Tim Shadbolt, the mayor of Invercargill, which will host three Rugby World Cup matches, told the paper. “It's certainly different to anything we have had before, but I guess that's how the world is moving."

The NZ government has outlawed ambush marketing and will also attempt to curtail it by having “clean zones” around each arena on the day before and day of games. That zone will not allow for any advertising or vending to be done in an area around each stadium.

"We are interested in making sure big corporates don't pop up with billboards and advertising where it's not supposed to be," a spokesman for the ministry told the Times.

Offenders can be fined up to $150,000, the newspaper reports.

Perhaps the recent assertion by the London Olympics that it wouldn’t tolerate ambush marketing helped the Ministry get more aggressive?