Event sponsorship and ambush marketing: Lessons from the Beijing Olympics

Sponsorship is bigbusiness.Major international sporting events–—such as the Summer and Winter Olympic Games,and theWorldSoccerCup–—commandsponsor fees running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, via which each global sponsor acquires marketing rights to the all-inclusive use of the event, its images, and logos. Worldwide sponsorship generated $663 million in revenue for the 2001—2004 Salt Lake City/Athens Olympic cycle. This total was easily exceeded by the Torino/Beijing cycle, in which revenues jumped 31% to $866 million; 11 multinational sponsors paid an average of $72 million each. More remarkably, these numbers represent only the fees for sponsorship rights; sponsors still had to pay for the advertising itself. Subsequent estimates placed total Business Horizons (2010) 53, 281—290