Monaco’s agreeably lenient (for some) rules relating to personal and corporate taxation, coupled with its almost flawless climate, attract a steady, if bizarre, mix of the seriously rich, shysters, oligarchs, gangsters, toppled dictators and a smattering of hugely successful sportsmen.
For most of these folk the principality’s annual focal point, the ‘glamorous’ event (which actually results in a temporary exodus of the impossibly wealthy who hate the noise and media glare) which projects this tiny strip of primarily rocky and reclaimed land to a colossal global audience, took place last Sunday.
Port Hercule was rammed with yachts the size of cross-Channel ferries, helicopters buzzed in from Nice to the rather precarious-looking landing area at Monaco’s heliport and the concentration of Lamborghinis and Ferraris suggested that, despite their mountains of cash, small, bald men who live in Monte Carlo also experience mid-life crises.
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The Monaco Grand Prix, hailed as the world’s most exciting road race, is woefully over-sold. The chances of one car actually overtaking another are as negligible as they are on the M42 any time between four and seven o’clock.
Nevertheless, what is essentially an extremely loud procession of mobile advertising hoardings also offers a succession of brewers and alcohol manufacturers a rare opportunity to flaunt their wares as close to French soil as they dare.
They should enjoy it while they can because the word is that Loi Evin, France’s two-decade-old law banning the advertising of alcohol on television, could soon be extended across Europe, a move which would represent a significant blow to Formula One teams.
The law was ratified by the European Court almost ten years ago and the French have since lobbied other EU states to follow suit. It’s believed the EU itself could take direct action.
Formula One has been here before. In anticipation of tobacco being banned, the sport made a conscious effort to avoid what it saw as restrictive advertising rules that were having an adverse financial impact. Accordingly, it branched out into countries such as Bahrain, China and India, not all of which could be considered roaring successes, but it’s worth noting that the Marlboro cigarette brand has managed to pump almost £600 million into Ferrari over the past decade. F1’s move into new territories was underpinned by such financial considerations.
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Nevertheless, EU-inspired laws resulted in F1 motorsport losing £149 million in sponsorship when tobacco advertising was voluntarily sidelined in 2007 before being banned completely by the EU in 2011.
Ironically, for a sport so reliant upon sponsorship revenues, for the first 17 years of F1’s life, between 1950 and 1967, sponsorship was not permitted. The FIA even frowned upon logos appearing upon the overalls of mechanics and technical staff standing in the pits. As a consequence, logo-free cars and drivers careered around racetracks in national colours.
By 1968, several suppliers, among them BP and Firestone, began to demand more coverage of their respective names in return for supplying their products free of charge. The FIA relented and later the same year, Imperial Tobacco paid £200,000 to have its corporate colours and logo prominently positioned on the cars and boiler suits of the Lotus team. Overnight, the team became known as Gold Leaf Team Lotus, and thus began a process which led to billions of pounds being pumped into the sport over the ensuing decades.
By 2006, tobacco company sponsorship was worth almost £150 million a year to Formula One teams, the most significant injection of cash into the sport by any sponsorship sector, before the FIA imposed a blanket ban upon tobacco company advertising and sponsorship.
Yet were alcohol advertising and sponsorship to be banned, it wouldn’t only be F1 that suffered.
Any restrictions on alcohol sponsorship would result in a huge loss of income to sports properties already conscious that their commercial relationships with fast food and soft drink companies could also be under threat as the West’s burgeoning anti-obesity debate rages on.
Aside from Formula One, a series of high-profile sports are heavily dependent upon alcohol-related revenues. Next month’s World Cup, for example, will promote Budweiser as a main sponsor – the company also sponsors the FA Cup – while Heineken have been involved in high-profile football (the Champions League) and rugby (the Heineken Cup) for years.
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Within F1, the whisky brand Johnnie Walker associates itself with the McLaren team at a cost of £4.8 million a year, while Williams started their 2014-15 campaign with a new title sponsor, Martini, who will pay ‘up to £50 million’ for the privilege over the coming years.
Alcohol and sport have become uneasy bedfellows and it’s likely that sponsorship restrictions could vary from the type of outright ban seen in France (the French are appalled that their tiny neighbour permits the ban to be flouted) to voluntary restrictions in place elsewhere.
Yet not only would a blanket ban on alcohol advertising be bad news for sport, it would have a serious impact upon brewers’ bottom lines too.
The reason is simple: sport sponsorship is extremely effective for alcohol manufacturers because it enables them to target their prime demographic (males aged 18-45), which is, of course, the key market for sport across the globe.
Furthermore, unlike most other forms of sponsorship, where the primary objective is longer-term brand-building, alcohol sponsorship usually comes with lucrative add-ons such as stadium pouring rights which, when combined with promotional spend during high-profile sports events, invariably have a dramatic short-term impact upon sales.
Not as though the brand-building potential of alcohol sponsorship can be underestimated. Carling’s ten-year sponsorship of what was then the Premiership resulted in it becoming the leading 海角视频 lager brand as a consequence.
Telephone and technology companies could theoretically fill at least part of any gap left by alcohol sponsors, although F1 could suffer from a considerable sponsorship shortfall for a number of years unless it can persuade more companies, particularly those in the Middle East and Asia, to back the sport.
Accordingly, most corporations interested in buying global exposure for its product can expect an approach from one or other of the F1 teams over the next 12 months.
But F1 sponsorship is not simply a case of slapping a logo on the front of a racing car; one company, Sports Marketing Surveys, reckons that sponsors spend a further £30 million between them measuring the efficiency of their sponsorship when generating that all-important brand exposure on television.
Furthermore, F1 sponsorship doesn’t come cheap: the most sought-after areas of each vehicle are the rear wing and sidepods where a prominent logo position with a leading team is likely to cost around £14 million a year.
Getting a logo on the front and either side of the car’s nose will set sponsors back approximately £10 million, while smaller logos, which often give the appearance of being added afterthoughts, cost anywhere up to £3 million each.
After the motor and sports clothing industries, alcohol manufacturers are European sport’s third-largest sponsorship sector.
This commercial fact cuts little ice with campaigners who point out that while F1 deserves credit for the effort it puts into driver safety, its association with alcohol, a factor in almost 35 per cent of road fatalities in western nations, appears more than a little incongruous.