As the London Olympics draws closer, once again the issue of advertising and marketing takes centre stage. Readers may recall what happened in 1984 when Fuji won the rights from the International Olympic Committee to be an official sponsor of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. This left Kodak out in the cold and they responded by ambushing Fuji with a well-planned advertising campaign. Hence, although Fuji was the official sponsor, many viewers saw Kodak’s ads and mistakenly believed Kodak was a sponsor too. Fuji eventually exacted revenge on Kodak which won sponsorship rights for the 1988 Games. Over the years, sponsorship contracts and the tactics of rival companies bourgeoned into a late 20th Century phenomenon known as “ambush marketing”. The term refers to the practice of appearing to align a brand with an event for which that brand has not paid for the right to be a sponsor.

The competitive nature of advertising and marketing, especially associated with global events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, has become ticklish, involving a lot of fine prints in the contracts. To say that sponsors are more jealously safeguarding their investments in recent years would be an understatement. My pocket endured some of the consequences of this type of aggressive marketing strategy at the Beijing Games when I could not recall my Visa credit card PIN and had almost run out of cash. Needless to say, Visa has had exclusive sponsorship rights at Olympic Games for quite some time. For convenience, I used another credit card but I to pay the price for that mistake.

My experience in Beijing brought back recollections of the 1994 winter Olympics in Norway when there was another memorable case of “ambush marketing”. The rival companies on this occasion were Visa and American Express. Visa had won sponsorship rights and mounted a fairly traditional advertising campaign in which they asserted that American Express cards were not accepted at the Olympic Villa. The response by American Express was brilliant. In a well-aired series of messages American Express simply stated that American travellers did not need any Visa to travel to Norway.

Readers may already conclude that a similar situation exists in the Caribbean involving our own Chris Gayle and the West Indies cricket team. In 2005, after Digicel inked a multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal with the West Indies Cricket Board, having the year before terminated their previous agreement with Cable and Wireless (now LIME), six players were signed to individual sponsorship deals by LIME, including Chris Gayle, creating an impasse which required intervention at the highest Caribbean political level. Gayle and the others noted that wearing the Digicel-branded apparel would invalidate their contract with LIME.

In my view, much of the dilemma in which the WICB recently found itself, in relation to Gayle, had its genesis in that dispute. Gayle was in good company. In 1992 when Michael Jordan accepted his Olympic medal on the podium in Barcelona, he draped a towel over the Adidas brand to satisfy his individual contract with Nike. Even though Adidas was the Olympic sponsor, Nike knew those photos of Jordan on the podium would persist for years, and they moved to protect their association with Jordan. I can’t recall Jordan suffering as much backlash as Gayle. Like Nike, LIME had every right to protect their investment and Gayle was well aware of that reality.

While we here in the Caribbean are understandably happy for sponsors and would want to encourage that more come on board, there are often some significant drawbacks. Undoubtedly, the arrival of sponsors, and especially shoe and drink sponsors, has multiplied the earnings of athletes all around the world, not the least of which are track and field athletes, long regarded as Cinderellas in marketing terms. In the early 1980s, when Jamaica’s sprint queen Merlene Ottey graduated from university, she struggled to earn decent money even though she was an Olympic and World Championship medallist. Today the case is a lot different and with good reasons.

With the growth of the Grand Prix (GP) circuit and the popularity of track and field athletics, especially in Europe, appearance and sponsorship fees for athletes have grown exponentially. The coming into being of the Golden League GP in 1998 consisting of six meetings annually in Oslo, Rome, Monaco, Zurich, Brussels and Berlin accelerated this development. Athletes (in selected events) who won their event at all six meetings were rewarded with a gold bar or a share of a US$1-million jackpot. This meant that for the first time top track and field athletes had the potential to earn big money on the circuit on a yearly basis. At the same time, the public benefited tremendously from the Golden League series, because, besides the Olympics or World Championship Games, we were guaranteed seeing the world’s best perform against each other regularly. In its early dispensation, with the exception of some of the American stars, all the world elites took part in the Golden League.

In 2010 the IAAF Diamond League replaced the Golden League. Arising from this, sponsorship, appearance fees, and all other financial benefits were significantly elevated. The main attractions for the public to the Golden League, the million-dollar worth of gold bars available to any athlete who won all of the meet in their event, was discarded in favour of a points system where the athlete who earned the most points in their particular event was declared the winner for that event and received remuneration accordingly. Unlike the GL, this meant that athletes no longer felt constrained to take part in every meet. In the Diamond League, they now only needed to secure enough points in their event and if an athlete was confident enough in their ability, then they could actually participate in a select few events and still amass enough points to be declared the champion. Add to that the tremendous increase in the value of sponsorship deals, hence most athletes are now very selective about what meets they attend and when they perform. To compound the issue, most of these meets have now aligned themselves with shoe, drink and other sponsors, which help the meets to defray costs and provide larger appearance fees and prize money.

The downside of this, however, is that when a meet is sponsored by a particular shoe company such as PUMA, Adidas or Nike, the athletes sponsored by a competitor are usually reluctant to attend. To some extent this is due to the sponsor’s zeal to protect their marketing investment by insisting that the athlete does not appear in outfits branded with the symbols of a rival.

As a result, part of the decision as to which athlete throws, runs or jumps is now a determination of who are the big sponsors. Hence, no longer seen at Diamond League meets is the consistent high-level competition, when the cream of the crop competes against each other, as was the case with the Golden League. Today this level of entertainment is almost solely restricted to World Championships and the Olympic Games.

However, in my view, from the public’s perspective, the positives of the League outweigh the negatives, in terms of its entertainment value and its importance in allowing lesser-known athletes a chance to emerge on the biggest stage.

antoye@gmail.com