Vodafone no friend of Ferrari

All very well and the Ferrari fans were happy that the team had once again secured a major sponsor that would assist the team in making their budget and hopefully keeping the team on top. So Vodafone were getting their money’s worth out of Ferrari with an instant impact on the Ferrari team and the watching fans.

Vodafone also took this deal as a cue to launch a massive campaign in their shops, on TV and on radio to highlight their new deal with Ferrari. The TV ads were great as were the radio, and anyone who is a Ferrari fan would have loved walking past the their local Vodafone shop with it full of Ferrari and Vodafone posters and flags. It is these adverts in shops that have caused a bit of fury from Ferrari fans.

I personally enquired inside two different Vodafone shops about this promotion and how long it would last, my main aim was to gather some of these items for my personal Ferrari collection once the promotion was over and the items would no longer be in use. Now on both occasions I was informed that the promotion would be running until the season end and after that the adverts would be changing and I would be more than welcome to have these items at that time.

This was prior to the Austrian Grand Prix though, and in the aftermath of this race in which Ferrari were classed as the most evil thing in F1 by the majority of media and non-Ferrari fans the adverts in the Vodafone shops began to disappear. Many fans probably thought nothing of it and just assumed that the promotion was over, but that was not what I had been told and it seems to many Ferrari fans now that the adverts were pulled until the FIA cleared Ferrari of doing anything wrong.

When the Ferrari deal with Vodafone was announced Chris Gent Vodafone’s Chief Executive said “This is an exceptionally good deal for us, and will give us greatly enhanced brand exposure throughout the world."

"Vodafone believes in backing winners, and Ferrari is a valuable addition to our existing successful global sponsorships."

So it seems now that Vodafone are more than happy to be with Ferrari when they are winning races, as long as when doing so they do not upset the anti-Ferrari media and fans. Vodafone have seemingly bowed to the ignorant masses and pulled their adverts in order to distance themselves from Ferrari at the time they needed their fans and sponsors to pull together. Why did they not pull their logo’s from the Ferrari chassis and drivers overall’s at the same time?