Ambush marketing proves there’s no such thing as bad publicity

AMBUSH or guerrilla marketing as utilised by Corona at the weekend is becoming the method of choice for many companies looking to maximise exposure at minimum cost, according to an industry expert.

And with the amount of media exposure the beer company achieved by paying the two Cork players to carry Corona branding on their boots in last weekend's All-Ireland quarter-final, they certainly achieved their aims.

"Ambush marketing is one of the few ways a small company at least in terms of their marketing share in Ireland can achieve this sort of exposure," says Joe Gantly, of Gantly and Associates, a PR and marketing consultancy firm.

"It was one thing to sign up the players and pay them what one must presume is a modest amount of money, but they also had to have someone in place to make the necessary phone calls to stir up the media's interest. It was probably good intuition that they could get a lot of mileage out of this, but there is more to it than that," Gantly maintains.

"The thing about ambush marketing is you avoid the usual channels regarding advertising and marketing techniques. It is getting harder and harder for consumer brands to reach their target audiences through these methods and, in the case of Corona, in a situation where they are up against giants like Guinness and Heineken, the bottom line is their advertising and marketing budgets simply cannot compete, so they look for alternatives and in this instance they came up with a good one.

"Theoretically we are all major viewers and readers and should be exposed to a lot of advertising. But the reality is a huge amount of it goes over our heads. In this instance, however, Corona wittingly or unwittingly have stirred up a major controversy and their brand is all over the newspapers and other media as a result and their brand is benefiting from the exposure."

The irony in this case is that Corona have copped a massive amount of media exposure without, in real terms, paying anything for it and all in respect of a competition which is sponsored to huge expense by Guinness.

As Gantly also points out, the value to the company of the exposure they got is pretty much immeasurable as well.

"If you were to price the cost of the cost of the column inches this has generated it would run to a very considerable amount of money in fact you literally could not have paid for it. Yet they have achieved tremendous exposure by the simple expedient of stirring up controversy and by then having somebody primed to alert the media to what they'd done. Ambush marketing is one of the few ways they could have achieved that," he said.

"They have made excellent use of the fact that while the GAA is not run by amateurs, but is run for amateurs and that situation means there are a lot of grey areas in the rules.

"As far as we can ascertain, this also applied to the use of advertising on boots. But if you look at the pictures in the papers, there is a second brand on the boots that of the manufacturer and, luckily for them, they are getting free advertising out of it too."