Why advertisers should embrace event typicality and maximize leveraging of major events

The current study details how marketing campaigns featuring event-typical ads adapted to sporting events (e.g., a car ad that displays its brand logo on an Olympic podium) affect brand attitudes and incentive-aligned brand choice in more positive ways than proven advertising strategies such as product category consistency. Presenting four field and lab experiments across a total of 3 events and 32 ads, we show that these effects are driven by the combination of 3 mechanisms: event-typical ads’ capacity to trigger a sufficient feeling of knowing what the ad is about, provoke curiosity, and transfer attributes from the event to the brand, even with very short ad exposures. Advertisers, brand managers, or event organizers can thus exploit the creative potential around sporting events by using event-typical ads. Furthermore, when these stakeholders know the most typical elements of an event, they can either adapt their marketing activities or register them to avoid ambush marketing (i.e., advertisers willing to associate their brand with the event in the absence of any legitimate link with it).