Next year’s big soccer jamboree is being promoted as an amazing opportunity for locals to make serious money. That may be so, but you’d better be careful about not falling foul of FIFA’s restrictive and complex marketing rules, or you too could be taken to court like a Cape Town firm making key-rings. CHARL FOURIE reports.
ALL around the country there is great anticipation of cash registers jingling next year, as tens of thousands of visitors come to our shores for the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup. The event’s main selling point in the effort to win local hearts and minds has been the lure of profits.
However, it now turns out that there are rules, and regulations, and fine-print, and you’d better know about all of that before you climb on the marketing bandwagon and put anything resembling the official logos and insignia on your marketing material, or in any way link your business to the event.
FIFA lawyers have already dealt with more than 200 probable contraventions of the law.
Local public relations and marketing operatives, and lawyers, are having to wade through all of this on behalf of their clients, and word is that it’s heavy going to find the loopholes, and what may be done without being accused of ‘ambush marketing’ – the term FIFA’s lawyers are bandying about for what they see as contraventions of the marketing rules.
In Cape Town a small family business was in dialogue with the authorities for some time about their intention to produce and market key-rings with the 2010 logo. They thought they’d got it right, but when their products were finally ready for market, the firm was summonsed to court to answer charges that they were in breach of the regulations.
Similarly, Eastwood Tavern - a restaurant near Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria, one of the match venues for the 2010 World Cup - was taken to court for putting the words ‘World Cup 2010’ on its sign. It also put up banners featuring the flags of a number of prominent football-playing countries accompanied by ‘2010’, and the words ‘Twenty Ten South Africa’.
Owen Dean, a lawyer at the heavyweight legal firm Spoor & Fisher, says FIFA asked that the ‘infringing’ sign and banners be removed, but the eatery refused. Then FIFA went to the Pretoria High Court, claiming interdicts against Eastwood Tavern for ‘trademark infringement’ of the registered trademarks ‘World Cup 2010TM’, ‘South Africa 2010 TM’ and ‘Twenty Ten South Africa TM’
FIFA won what Dean calls “this first round against ambush marketing”, when the High Court of South Africa (North Gauteng) agreed with their lawyers.
FIFA’s main weapon is the provisions of Section 15A of the Merchandise Marks Act, which empowers the Minister for Trade and Industry to designate major sporting events as so-called ‘protected events’. In May 2006, the then Trade and Industry Minister declared the event to be a protected one.
Says Dean: “This prevents ambush marketers from, for example, attempting to obtain special promotional benefit from the 2010 World Cup, or be associated with it, without becoming sponsors.”
Section 15A of the Merchandise Marks Act makes it a criminal offence to use event trademarks ‘with the intent, and effect, of obtaining special promotional benefit from the publicity attached to the tournament without the authority of the event organiser’.
Local businesses are advised to get out the smoke and mirrors. And talk to a good lawyer.
