BRAND STRATEGY
“Brands need to recognise the value of their social media assets and protect them accordingly,” says Smith.
“Tere is no excuse for not taking sensible precautions such as using the most secure passwords and taking care over who has access to them, as well as using management tools to ensure that employee access to accounts can be easily revoked,” he says.
Sponsorship scandals
Sportswear brand Nike is well known for its high profile advertising campaigns featuring some of the world’s most celebrated athletes.
However, in February this year the company had to suspend its contract with Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius aſter he admitted shooting dead his girlfriend at their home in South Africa. At the time he was arrested, Pistorius featured in an ad on Nike’s website under the slogan ‘I am the bullet in the chamber’.
Nike pulled the ads immediately and suspended the contract one week later. But as Internet users pointed out in a series of online memes, it’s not the first time an athlete affiliated with
the company has been involved in scandal: in October 2012, Nike terminated its contract with cyclist Lance Armstrong aſter he was stripped of his Tour de France titles for his involvement in illegal doping and in 2009, it was leſt red-faced when client Tiger Woods was revealed to be a serial adulterer.
While it’s impossible to prevent a client behaving badly,
James Hennigan, a partner at Squire
Sanders who specialises in sports, branding and IP law, says there are measures brands can take to limit the damage done if a sponsorship campaign turns sour.
“Sponsorship deals can be high risk but with high rewards. Te best thing a brand can do to protect itself is insert a morality or good behaviour clause into its contract with a sports star or celebrity. Tese clauses allow the brand to terminate a contract, and possibly recover payments made to a celebrity if that person misbehaves,” he says.
As Hennigan points out, though, there is a fine balance to be struck between protecting your assets and deterring potential clients.
“Tere should be measures in place to allow for a quick and clean escape in the case of a high profile
scandal, but brands have to weigh up whether it is worth terminating a contract from both a legal and a public relations perspective, and it should be reserved for serious cases. If a brand is seen to terminate a contract the moment an athlete steps a little out of line, others maybe discouraged from agreeing to endorse that brand,” he adds.
Sonia Patel, a senior associate at Field Fisher Waterhouse, says brands should also maintain a close relationship with an athlete’s representatives, particularly those responsible for their public relations and social media activity.
“Parties can then work together in making appropriate statements and sending out the right messages in all relevant media. Te more proactive a brand is in handling a crisis, the more likely it is to recover from it,” she says.
“However, when making such statements in social media, the brand should bear in mind that the tone of any such messages is tailored to the target audience. For example, a corporate message which might be included in a press release may not be suitable for a Twitter or Facebook audience and humour should be used very carefully,” she adds.
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Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 2, Issue 2
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