The 'orange dress' World Cup ambush

If you are not Dutch and live outside Holland until this morning you would probably have been unaware of 'Bavaria Beer' and their unofficial Orange Dress World Cup promotion. Casual viewers may have noticed the group of around 30 or so Dutch women wearing unbranded orange dresses at the Netherlands v Denmark game on Monday (they were a favourite for the TV cameras), but would not have known their significance.

However inside the Netherlands, the Orange Dress is part of Bavaria beer's marketing. So far Bavaria claim to have sold 100,000 and hope to eventually hit 200,000. The Orange Dress has been promoted on beer packs and featured in TV ads:

the Orange Dress has been modelled for Bavaria by Sylvie van der Vaart (wife of key Dutch player Rafael van der Vaart):

and the Orange Dress was also part of a (Bavaria organised?) 'Flash mob' in the crowd at the pre-tournament Netherlands vs Mexico match:

So when World Cup organisers FIFA saw a group of women in orange dresses at Monday's match, they ended up ejecting them from the stadium (even though the orange dress has no branding on it.) The Orange dress wearers were then (allegedly) questioned for several hours by police. This is part of FIFA's action to stamp out ambush marketing and protect official tournament sponsors, in this case beer sponsor Budweiser.

'Women in Orange Dresses arrested at World Cup match' makes good news copy though and this story has been featured across the World. Furthermore, this morning in the UK the story grew after World Cup broadcaster ITV had to fire one of their World Cup pundits when the tickets that the women were holding were traced back to a him. The story and the associated picture (inevitably the women in Orange Dresses at the match) is now on numerous UK front pages.

In todays connected world, stunts and events can drive both press coverage and conversation. The Bavaria Orange Dress stunt at the Holland v Denmark match managed to gain prominence in both the TV coverage of the game and then make news pages around the world as a result of the FIFA response.

This creates a difficult situation for organisers of an event like the World Cup. When faced with brands who are determined to associate themselves with the event unofficially then bodies like FIFA are in a difficult position - especially when the contravening item in question is an orange dress with no branding on it. Do nothing and upset sponsors, clamp down on things and upset the fans involved and risk highlighting / increasing the spotlight on the unofficial activity that they were trying to stop - and whatever happens FIFA can't stop people talking about it and discussing it with each other online.

....and now we hear that Bavaria are making the dresses in the colours of other countries with Spanish, French, English and South African versions on the way too: