Sponsors get shirty

Platform:The Cricket World Cup has been a remarkable tournament for many reasons, not least Ireland's performances on the pitch. Behind the scenes, the action is no less fevered as the future of sport's relationship with business comes under scrutiny, writes Richard Gillis.

One incident in Jamaica at the match between Ireland and Pakistan on St Patrick's Day shows where things might be going.

An RTÉ news crew tried to interview a few members of the "Blarney Army", the Irish supporters who have added so much to the atmosphere.

There are restrictions on what RTÉ can do as they have not paid for the rights to broadcast from this event. The main constraint is they are not allowed to film inside the ground.

Conscious of this, the RTÉ reporter asked a handful of Irish fans to join him outside the gates of Sabina Park stadium to do a little colour piece to camera. And that is where it got silly.

Seeing what they were doing, an International Cricket Council (ICC) official ran over and stopped the filming. The reason? One of the fans was wearing an Ireland football shirt. On the shirt was an Umbro logo. Umbro is not an official partner of the Cricket World Cup.

Similarly, spectators walking in to the grounds undergo a thorough search and security check.

In Georgetown for Ireland's match against England last week, I was asked to remove the stickers on the bottle of water I'd bought from the hotel. Pepsi is a sponsor and, apparently, only its water can be drunk in the stadium. Fans are told to leave any "offending" products in large bins next to the entrance. At a previous World Cup, in South Africa, a man was ejected from a match for drinking a can of Coke.

At the heart of all this is money and a deep insecurity. Cricket is now a hugely commercial sport, based mainly on its appeal to the Indian market. As the governing body, the ICC has been very successful in selling the event, the cash cow of the world game.

The TV rights for the next two World Cups were recently sold to Asian broadcaster ESPN Star for $1.1 billion (€823 million).

Sponsorship has also brought in enormous sums, as corporations seek to bask in the game's reflected glory. The logos of Pepsi, LG, Hutchison 3 and Honda dominate the playing surface, circled by a host of other brands on the perimeter boards.

These companies have paid top dollar for category exclusivity. One effect of this has been the removal of the Bank of Ireland logo from the Irish shirts.

Bank of Ireland pays the Irish Cricket Union €200,000 over three years, a deal up for renewal at the tournament's end. However, the presence of Scotia Bank of Canada as an official partner means that Bank of Ireland is "conflicted out" of the event. This is a major blow in publicity terms. The Ireland team has received enormous coverage across the world's media.

The value of this coverage is very substantial when put against the equivalent advertising rates, the key indicator of sponsor value.

However, in today's marketing environment, category exclusivity is a hard promise to keep. Athletes and coaches attending July's Pan American Games have been forbidden from updating their blogs. And organisers of the Rugby World Cup this autumn are looking to restrict the use of photographs to stop sponsors losing out.

The unease among organisers of these events is fuelled by recent experience. Following the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, research indicated that, when asked to recall the sponsor, most people said Nike - despite the company not paying a euro to FIFA in sponsorship fees.

The finding was noted by arch-rivals Adidas, which paid $60 million to be an official sponsor.

Likewise, Digicel, Denis O'Brien's mobile company, which is very high-profile in this part of the world, is proving adept at working close to the ICC's ambush marketing rules.

Two questions present themselves. Firstly, how far can companies be prevented from advertising their product in a free market? The second is specific to this Cricket World Cup: at what point does policing of ambush marketing have a negative impact on the firms it is designed to protect?

The case against the ICC is that it gets it wrong on the margins: the heavy-handedness of its approach creates a story of its own, which grabs headlines for the wrong reasons and is ultimately self-defeating.

Pepsi was reportedly very angry about the "Coke man" farrago. The company wanted to be linked to cultural diversity, tradition and fair play. But through no fault of its own, it came across as petty and vindictive.

Not what it signed up for at all.

• Richard Gillis's new column on the business of sport will appear in rotation with our regular business columnists Sheila O'Flanagan and Bill Murdoch