The impact of ambush marketing on a hallmark sports event - the case of Euro 2012

Ambush marketing contains an increasing threat to official sponsors of hallmark sporting events. This paper reports on findings from a strategic observation audit of one host city of the Euro 2012 football championships: Kiev. The findings suggest that the rights protection programme used by UEFA at UERO 2012 failed to adequately protect the official sponsors since numerous examples of ambush marketing were identified during the systematic and strategic observational audit and was supported by the empirical findings of the qualitative research. This failure, however, could be only partly blamed on the rights protection programme and mostly resulted from poor co-operation between the key event stakeholders, including UEFA, local authorities and sponsors who failed to monitor and act on the ambush marketing activities.