Guerrilla marketing is a rising trend in sports promotion … just don’t call it that
The room was packed at the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit as panellists from News Corp, Tourism Australia, and IHG sat down to discuss the rising power and cost of sports marketing, and the opportunities available in sports tourism.
Sporting tourism is a booming business. According to Yougov research, 70% of Aussies say they would travel domestically this year for a sporting event. With this, the price of being an official event sponsor has gone through the roof.
The days of simply whacking a logo on a pair of footy shorts are long gone — now brands aren’t sponsors, they are ‘official partners’, with official tie-ins, bespoke merchandise, on-site activations, airport billboards, TV commercials, six-month social media strategies, and everything in-between. It’s not the Tillies, after all, it’s the CommBank Matildas.
When the 20-metre line on a football oval has a major bank as a naming sponsor — and the oval itself is named after a corporation that makes Hollywood movies from old comic-book characters — you know the chance of smaller brands getting officially involved in a major sporting event is … well, it’s slimmer than the Socceroos winning the upcoming World Cup.
