Among all the out-of-box marketing ideas, Ambush marketing has a unique place and is well regarded by the practitioners of non-standard marketing methods. Ambush marketing at its most basic level refers to practices to hijack the advertising campaign of another brand to use them for the benefit of your own brand Qamar Zaman Dallas SEO Consultant and Head of KISS PR SEO
Ambush marketers basically rely on the success of their competitors to launch their own advertising and marketing programs. One of the first and most successful examples of ambush marketing is the dispute between VISA and American Express, which erupted during the 1992 Winter Olympics, which took place in Albertville, France.
VISA was the official sponsor of the 1992 Winter Olympics and launched an aggressive advertising campaign on television and other media, urging American Express Card users to leave their cards at home because “the Olympics are not the American Express take “. This was true to some extent as only VISA cards were used to purchase Olympic tickets, but American Express was still valid for paying hotel, restaurant, bills, and was accepted at some companies based around Olympic site.
American Express officials complain about misleading ads and claim that VISA ads make it seem as if American Express cards are not accepted in the vicinity of players and have decided to launch a counter-advertising campaign that targets very successful visas. The tagline of their ad was “You need a passport to travel from Spain to France, not a VISA”. To some extent this was true because one only needs a passport to travel between France and Spain, but American Express targeted VISA through this double meaning ad, which conveyed to viewers that they do not need a Visa card if they want to d ‘Attending Winter Olympics in the French Alps.
Another example of this is a recent ad campaign launched by the Indian dairy brand AMUL to sell its new range of butter cookies. Britannia was the leader in the butter biscuit category in India, while AMUL was the dominant dairy product brand, only recently launching its biscuit range and looking for out-of-box ideas to promote its butter biscuits.
AMUL designed a clever marketing campaign that displayed images of its butter biscuits alongside the image of butter biscuits from Britannia. The text said that the other butter biscuits had only 0.3% -3% butter and 22% vegetable oil, while AMUL’s butter biscuit had full 25% butter and 0% vegetable oil.
AMUL was able to push the point that its butter cookies outperformed the competition by using only an image of the competing product and not even mentioning who their competitor was. This is a good example of an intelligent ambush marketing campaign that targeted and successfully bought the marketing campaign of a competing brand.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RR9JVFzRmc&t=494s
