By Christian Mahne in Sydney

Sunday afternoon "at the footy" is an Australian institution.

But behind the sporting passion lies a marketers' dream.

The crowds watching matches fits a very specific sales demographic.

They have two passions...one is sport, the other is home ownership

Tony Davis

Put the right brand in front of them, the theory goes, and you'll get a positive response.

Since the 2000 Olympic Games, Australia has become one of the most commercially viable centres for sports branding in the world.

There is barely a team or a stadium without a corporate sponsor these days.

Earlier this year, Mortgage Lender "Aussie Home Loans" signed a five-year naming rights deal for the Sydney Football Stadium.

Overnight, the ground became Aussie stadium and the company hasn't looked back.

Tony Davis, General Manager of Marketing for Aussie, came up with the stadium branding idea.

"You get an association with the heart of the Australian psyche and that is sport. They have two passions it seems to me in Australia. One is sport, the other is home ownership. So a mortgage company is not a bad organization to actually sponsor a stadium."

Expensive game

Putting your name up in lights doesn't come cheap though.

Branding deals for some of Australia's top venues run at about $5m a year.

Nor does it stop there, if you sponsor a stadium everything from the quality of the food to the seating ends up reflecting on the sponsor.

For the most successful sports branding deals, naming rights are just the beginning of the process.

The trick is to build a whole marketing strategy around the sponsorship - and that can become an expensive business as Greg Daniel, chief executive of Marketing Strategists "Issues and Images" explains.

"You can use a rule of thumb that says for every dollar that you spend on sponsorship you probably have to spend two dollars more on leveraging that sponsorship to make it really work for you.

"I think this is again what people found out during the Olympics games, that they may have been spending $50m on sponsorship but that was simply the entry fee.

"They then had to spend another $100m leveraging the sponsorship through advertising, promotion, marketing and other things. The ones that did that were wildly successful."

A losing game?

But branding sports isn't a one-way bet.

A poor team performance can drag the sponsor's name down but the real problems come when sponsors get into difficulty.

Enron signed a $100m deal to be naming sponsor for the Houston Astros new stadium.

As details of Enron's financial wrongdoing came out, the Astros' public image suffered.

In the end, the Astros bailed out of the deal but had to pay Enron $2.1m for the privilege. They are now sponsored by the altogether less controversial Minute Maid juice company.

So, sports branding has its risks. But, fittingly for a nation obsessed with its sport, Australian marketers have an adage.

The public, they say, are always ahead of the game.