Ambush on Euro 2004

Ten official sponsors paid record fees of around £15 million each to be associated with major international football tournament Euro 2004. As sponsorship opportunities are increasingly being ambushed by non-sponsoring organisations, tournament organisers UEFA attempted to put preventative measures in place to block such ambush attempts on the tournament. This paper gathered quantitative data designed to assess whether or not audiences could correctly identify these official sponsors both spontaneously and prompted, prior to, and following the final match of the tournament. Results gathered from spontaneous responses point to the ineffectiveness of UEFA's measures, which appeared to have been overcome by non-sponsoring organisations simply buying regular advertising time on a commercial television station showing the tournament matches, using relevant celebrity endorsements, or underlining their brand's associations with football. Correct identification of official sponsors was much higher with prompted responses both pre and post-event. Yet although non-sponsoring organisations did not achieve significantly higher levels of identification post-event, levels of incorrect identification of these organisations as sponsors were still high enough to warrant concern about the ambush effect, despite UEFA's efforts at counteracting this.