Today is the eve of the Super Bowl, so let me recount one of the silliest examples of how corporations wage war against each other. This is a story of how Walmart uses gamers to sells chicken wings to football fans.
It shouldn't be surprising that "Super Bowl" (and variations) are trademarked by the NFL, and this trademark is enforced. The NFL (as distinct from its constituent teams) gets a lot of revenue from brands paying money to be "The Official 3D Intraoral Scanner of the NFL" (an actual thing).
To charge money, this partnership has to actually do something, so the NFL is aggressive at suing anyone else who tries to imply a football connection. And the Super Bowl is so popular, that there's a lot of money to be made riding its coattails. Millions of people are buying extra beer for the weekend, but only Budweiser is allowed to advertise for it; Coors can run ads, but if they mention the Super Bowl then the lawyers will kick down their doors.
The Big Game™®
Of course, companies are always looking for ways to 1) run advertisements 2) not pay money to anyone else. Vegas casinos pioneered the work-around of calling it "The Big Game." Which, in the United States in early February is actually quite unambiguous. No hockey match will ever be called "the big game."
The phrase "The Big Game" is now so associated with the Super Bowl, that the NFL tried to trademark that phrase as well. This attempt filed, not for good reasons, but for dumb reasons: UC Berkeley and Stanford had already been calling their rivalry "The Big Game" since 1892. And critically, that was also a football game, so the NFL couldn't salvage their claim by limiting the scope (the other claimant to "Big Game" was a lottery, which the NFL could have defeated by narrowing scope to sports, or football).
The Big Game
A few years back, I was looking closely at a Walmart advertisement for professional reasons. This was their Super Bowl"""The Big Game""" advertisement, where they show towering collections of chicken wings and soda around a biggest-screen TV showing the Super Bowl. Demonstrating what you, an American consumer could do, and therefore what you should do: buy all this shit to celebrate the Game, which is Big.
But what is this Game which Bigs? Look closely, at the screen. Look. See those pixels? There's no football at all in this football ad.
That's right, it was Madden. There was even a little xbox, tucked in a corner, to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability.
Walmart was spending millions of dollars running ads in every newspaper in the printer, pretending to advertise to gamers. Legally, their marketing department lives in a universe where hundreds of millions of Americans are going to buy a billion pounds of chicken wings this weekend, to play video games.
There is nothing Super Bowl or Super Bowl-adjacent about any of the promotions we're running. Our market research just happens to show that sometime in February, if we advertise chicken wings to gamers we make billions of dollars. The data is right there.