Ambush Marketing of Sports Mega-Events

Abstract

This chapter will provide, as background for the later chapters, a largely descriptive overview of the definitions and practices of ambush marketing and of the legal bases for protection available to sports organisations and their commercial partners against ambushing. The final section will set the scene for critical analysis of the legitimacy of anti-ambushing laws as undertaken in the later chapters, by briefly but seriously interrogating the question of whether all forms of ‘ambushing’, as marketing efforts by non-sponsors around events is often characterised, are in fact legally and ethically ‘wrong’. This is a crucially important exercise, as the chapters that follow will examine criticisms that have been expressed in recent years regarding the sometimes draconian and excessive protections that international sports organisations have been able to impose on the governments of host nations for major events, in furthering or maintaining the commercial interests of such organisations and of their commercial partners.