It’s that time of the year again when advertisers and sponsors get to hitch their brands to Irish rugby in some way. But not all of it works, writes David Quinn.
If, like me, you’ve been wondering whether this rain is ever going to end, I have some good news. Spring is on the way. How do I know? Because the rugby boys in green have returned to our screens.
In Ireland, the arrival of the Guinness Six Nations isn’t just a sporting event, it’s a marketing season. Rugby doesn’t simply kick off on the pitch, it scrummages its way across the advertising landscape.
Overnight, every sector from finance to food delivery rediscovers a profound emotional connection to line-outs, legacy and the green jersey.
In theory, for the brands involved, this makes perfect sense. In practice, it’s a very different matter. When a brand runs a rugby themed campaign during the Guinness Six Nations, the strongest assets in play aren’t the advertiser’s. They’re the team’s. The jersey. The anthem. The roar of the crowd. The brand itself often becomes a sponsor-shaped blur at the end of the ad.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: the stronger the cultural property, the greater the risk it swallows the brand whole. Consumers remember the team. They remember the feeling. They remember the tournament. But they rarely remember the brand.
The issue isn’t that rugby is culturally powerful. It absolutely is. The issue is ubiquity.
When everyone reaches for the same emotional shorthand at the same time, it stops being distinctive. It becomes wallpaper. What remains in the consumer’s mind is a vague recollection that “someone” was supporting the team.
That’s not brand advertising. That’s category advertising dressed in a scrum cap.
And it’s misattribution in action once again.
Misattribution doesn’t just occur within competitive categories. It also happens when multiple brands across completely different sectors deploy the same cultural cues simultaneously. The mental availability created by those cues doesn’t distribute evenly. It flows disproportionately toward the biggest spender or the brand with the strongest existing memory structures. And that brand may not even be in your category.
Everyone else? They’re effectively paying for another brand’s fame.
Celebrity can absolutely drive attention. But attention without distinctiveness is just expensive theatre. If your ad could be swapped with three other rugby-themed campaigns and nobody would notice, it isn’t brand-building. It’s seasonal participation.
And participation is not a strategy.
This isn’t an anti-rugby argument. Nor is it an anti-sponsorship argument. Cultural moments matter. Shared experiences matter. National pride matters. But the first job of advertising hasn’t changed: Be remembered. For the right brand.
If your ad looks and feels like everyone else’s, you’re not competing. You’re contributing to a collective marketing fund for whoever has invested most heavily in distinctive memory structures.
And the truly predictable part?
And just as spring fades, summer will announce itself in Irish advertising with the arrival of the GAA stereotype. He’s the rural cousin of the standard rugby protagonist but a little more windswept, a little more parish-proud, and fuelled by the noble purity of amateur status and love of county.
The jerseys change. The music shifts. The clichés refresh. But the underlying problem remains the same.
David Quinn is a founder and business director of Bloom and a board member of IAPI
