Spotters' thread for the advertising and promotional campaigns that were obviously planned a year ago to coincide with England's participation in Euro 2008 and appear to have had to be rehashed and kind of shuffled out anyway.

Mars are apparently giving away 100,000 footballs in promotional packs, the line is now something like "come on kids, let's get playing this summer!". Not a mention of Euro 2008 or Wayne Rooney anywhere.

I wonder if companies with Euro 2008 marketing tie-ins can take out insurance on that.

An insurer could collect premiums from advertisers all over Europe. The payoutss to the companies who had invested in ultimately useless ad campaigns would be covered by those whose teams got in.

I would think that they could, but that a pan-European advertiser like Mars is more likely to "self-insure" by allocating resources to different markets depending on results.

I have to say that there we are seeing very little evidence of the fact that Italy are about to compete in a major tournament. The electronics stores have been running the usual "buy a big screen for the Euros" type stuff, but the only other campaign I've noticed is by the Swiss tourism office trying to get people to come. There was also a story in the Gazzetta that the bottled water company that Del Piero does adverts for did two versions of a spot, with different takes depending on whether or not their boy is in the final 23.