Page 174 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

New Media Sportscapes: Branding and the Internet • 163

(Coots 2007). Mobile interactive ‘Adidas +10 World Cup Tours’ provided fans with
opportunities to play on an infl atable pitch, attend a coaching clinic, watch amateur
games and compete on an Xbox. Fans could also become members of the +10 So-
ciety. Adidas attempted to dominate the sportscape and paid to shut Nike out of all
advertising during televised World Cup matches in the United States (‘Adidas World
Cup’ 2006). They also worked with the Federation Internationale de Football As-

sociation (FIFA) and host cities to ensure that official sponsors gained privileged
access to potential desirable outdoor spaces.
Members of the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) were also present in the sports-
cape. The CCC is an international group focused on improving working conditions
within the global garment and sportswear industries. They focus on issues such as
low wages and human rights violations. The CCC campaign included a speaking tour
throughout Germany, protests at Adidas directors’ meetings, street theatre, an interac-
tive Web site, videos and the handing out of postcards with which individuals could
submit comments to Adidas. They adopted the campaign slogan ‘Fair P(l)ay’, a twist
on the FIFA fair play code.
This multimedia extravaganza used the Adidas brand to bring fans and football
together in numerous interactive ways, managing even to embrace consumer oppo-
sition to the brand itself. Considered in this way, the brand is not simply some-
thing that the media advertises; rather, it is a medium in its own right. Sport is
increasingly mediated through the brand. To unravel the ways it is able to do this, it
is necessary to focus on the features that define the complex entity of the brand.

The Sport Brand as New Media Object

Lury (2004) considered the multilayered character of the brand to constitute it as a
new media object. She argued that despite our tendency to name it as such, the brand
is far from being a single thing. For Lury, brand is a site of interactivity, organising a
dynamic, two-way exchange of information between consumers and producers. The
brand does not simply mediate cultural meanings, but has a legally recognised iden-
tity as a trademark. Logos make possible brand recognition across multiple, shifting
product lines. A successful logo is dynamically linked in the mind of the consumer
with a host of associations, capable of highlighting one facet of the brand image, then
another. Lury (2004) argued that it is the incompleteness of the brand that makes it
so effective as a mode of capital accumulation and so interesting to consumers and
sociologists.
In No Logo, Klein (2000) argued that brands have propelled the work of advertis-
ing into new realms:

Advertising and sponsorship have always been about using imagery to
equate products with positive cultural and or social experiences. What makes