Overview

The papers have been filled over the last couple of days with reports of the orange mini-dress-sporting football fans who were thrown out of the Holland v Denmark World Cup game earlier this week. Whilst the majority of the media appear to have picked up the story more as an excuse to show images of the fans themselves than out of any great concern for the legal issues involved, for trade mark lawyers it does raise some interesting issues.

Ambush marketing is an ever present feature of any major sporting event, and it's certainly got FIFA cross on this occasion. So what exactly does ambush marketing mean? Well, essentially it is marketing that takes place at or around an event (Usually a sports event) in which the marketer does not pay a fee to the organisers of the event, but instead tries to find some unofficial way of getting its brand out there during the course of the event. The issue has arisen at pretty much every major sporting event in recent years, perhaps notably the first time in 1992 when Nike sponsored the US basketball team, despite Reebok being the official sponsor of the Barcelona Olympics.

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