More than 30 women showed up at the Netherlands-Denmark match wearing orange mini-dresses emblazoned with the name of a Dutch brewery _ earning them a red card from World Cup officials who acted to quash what they called an ambush marketing scam. 
 
 Barbara Castelein shows the tag of her dress during an interview outside the Soccer City in Johannesburg, Tuesday, June 15, 2010. FIFA is defending itself for questioning more than 30 young, blonde women... (Associated Press) 
 
 Barbara Castelein, left, and Mierte, both from the Netherlands, walk after an interview outside the Soccer City stadium Soccer City in Johannesburg, Tuesday, June 15, 2010. FIFA is defending itself for... (Associated Press) 
 
 Barbara Castelein, left, and Mierte, both from Neatherlands, walk after an interview outside the Soccer City stadium Soccer City in Johannesburg, Tuesday, June 15, 2010. FIFA is defending itself for... (Associated Press) 
 
 The stunt may have irked FIFA, soccer's governing body. But it got Dutch brewer Bavaria NV exactly what it wanted. 
 
 "That's the free publicity they were looking for," said John Sweeney, head of advertising at the University of North Carolina's school of journalism and mass communications. "But (for FIFA), there's paranoia about ambush marketing. Sponsors pay a lot of money, and are demanding exclusivity. 
 
 "It's two colliding things in a chess game." 
 
 Companies such as Budweiser pay millions to have their names attached to the World Cup, and FIFA has plenty of incentive to protect its sponsors _ almost $300 million worth. According to FIFA's 2009 financial report, 97 percent of the federation's $1.06 billion in revenues came from TV and marketing rights, with sponsorship deals providing $277 million. 
 
 But the sponsorships don't pack the same punch if two or three companies can claim to be the "official (fill-in-the-blank) provider of the World Cup," which is why FIFA goes to great lengths to protect their exclusivity. Only official partners are allowed to use the World Cup for advertising and promotion campaigns. 
 
 In ambush marketing, non-sponsors try to sneak their logos or associate their brand names with a major sports event to reap free advertising. Imagine a pack of Bud Girls showing up at an event where Miller was the official beer sponsor. 
 
 So organizers of events like the Olympics or the World Cup employ staff to make sure that non-sponsors or their logos are kept out of sporting venues. 
 
 When Bavaria's orange mini-dress brigade showed up at Monday's game, FIFA was ready. Budweiser is the official World Cup beer, the only one sold at World Cup stadiums and official fan viewing sites. Anheuser-Busch Inbev is one of FIFA's eight "second-tier" World Cup sponsors, giving it exclusive sales rights. 
 
 Bavaria NV has been selling special eight-packs of beer including the skimpy orange "Dutchy Dress" since April. Bavaria's name is on a small blue tag at the bottom of the dress. 
 
 Barbara Castelein and a woman who would only give her name as Mirte said Bavaria NV gave them an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa. They and 34 women who live in South Africa went to the Netherlands-Denmark game dressed as Danish supporters. 
 
 But in the 25th minute of the match, the women stripped off their red-and-white gear to reveal their bright orange dresses, tossing the other clothes into the crowd. 
 
 "People were standing on their chairs and everyone wanted to make a picture with us," Mirte said. 
 
 FIFA officials escorted the women out of the stadium after the game and took them to the nearby offices of the South African Football Federation, where the women said they were questioned for several hours. 
 
 "There were no arrests. No one was detained," FIFA spokesman Nicolas Maingot said. "The only thing that we have done is actually asking some details (from) these women who have been involved. What seems to have happened is that there was a clear ambush marketing activity by a Dutch brewery company." 
 
 Bavaria NV did not return several phone calls seeking comment from The Associated Press on Tuesday. 
 
 Bavaria pulled a similar stunt in 2006, outfitting male fans in distinctive orange lederhosen with a black tail displaying the company's name. 
 
 "I'm a little bit surprised that FIFA didn't learn a lesson from that," said Jim Andrews, senior vice president at IEG, a Chicago-based sponsorship consulting firm. "Quite honestly, if they'd let the women into the stadium and let them have their orange dresses and do what they were going to do, they probably wouldn't have given Bavaria the publicity." 
 
 A huge photo of the women ran across the top of the front page of the Johannesburg daily The Star. 
 
 That's the danger in confronting ambush marketers, said T. Bettina Cornwell, a professor of marketing and sport management at the University of Michigan. Cornwell co-authored a study that found drawing attention to ambush marketing can actually backfire, cementing the renegade company in consumers' minds. 
 
 "The question is, what is the ultimate result?" Cornwell said. "And one of things our study shows is, over time, people lose the particulars. In a few days or weeks, they'll just remember Bavaria and the World Cup. And those orange dresses." 
 
 Indeed, Mirte and Castelein spent most of Tuesday posing for photos and doing interviews with news organizations from around the globe. 
 
 While Maingot said FIFA was looking into "all available legal remedies" against Bavaria NV, Sweeney said the damage is done. 
 
 "It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said, "and the mouse won." 
 
 ___ 
 
 AP Sports Columnist John Leicester and AP Sports Writer Graham Dunbar contributed to this report. ||||| At last, a human rights cause to draw even the most rugby-obsessed Afrikaner into the World Cup: some Dutch-effect women have been detained for wearing orange dresses at Soccer City. Details of this rapidly developing international incident remain contested, with the oppressors (the young ladies) telling a slightly different tale to that being spun by the victim (Fifa). The fallout has seen ITV pundit Robbie Earle fired, and at this rate Prince Harry may well be implicated by dawn … but here are the facts, such as they can be established. 
 
 On Monday a group of 36 women attended the game between Holland and Denmark wearing orange dresses available from the leading Dutch beer brand Bavaria, although they bear no logo. As one of the Holland fans tells The Star newspaper in Johannesburg: "We were sitting near the front, making a lot of noise, and the cameras kept focusing on us." 
 
 At this point, accounts diverge. According to the women, they were surrounded by stewards, who took them to be questioned by Fifa and the police. The officers warned their mini-dressed suspects that they could be arrested for ambush marketing and spend six months in jail. Then they drove them home after making copies of their passports and vowing to investigate further. 
 
 A Fifa spokesman, meanwhile, swears blind that the miscreants were allowed to stay in their seats until the end of the game, and that they were "young South African women being used by a large Dutch brewery". Think of them as advertising mules. 
 
 Fifa does concede that the 36 marketing insurgents were taken to what is described as a "facility", where they were questioned by the authorities. Meanwhile, it turns out that the entire block of tickets used by the ladies was allocated to our own Robbie Earle, who passed on his 50 – that's right, 50! – free tickets to Bavaria beer. He has now been fired by ITV. 
 
 Naturally, Bavaria beer is far from heartbroken at this high-profile outcome, with a spokesman observing of the logo-less dresses: "Fifa doesn't have a monopoly on the colour orange." 
 
 Or do they? Are there any other colours to which Fifa owns exclusive rights? What sort of prison stretch is one looking at for taupe? 
 
 On these inquiries, alas, the organisation's official spokesman is unwilling to be drawn – although he is keen to praise Fifa operatives, who apparently seized some flags bearing a Ghanaian company's name at the Serbia v Ghana game on Sunday. 
 
 On the one hand, then, it is yet another triumph for Fifa's chillingly efficient rights protection team. But on the other, the whole episode affords another glimpse of the World Cup's funny old moral universe. Clearly you can't do what Robbie Earle did and keep your job (unless you're Fifa vice-president Jack Warner, who made an estimated $1m flogging his 2006 World Cup tickets). But we can all probably do without Fifa's "fair play in marketing" lectures, which clothe commercial ruthlessness in the language of sporting decency, apparently oblivious to the impression given by wallpapering every stadium with signs that push BP or declare "We proudly accept only Visa". 
 
 "The beautiful game," Fifa reiterated yesterday, faces a deadly threat: "ambush marketing activities" by firms who wish "to secure themselves a slice of the [World Cup] rewards illicitly without offering any financial support in return". 
 
 This sort of rabid protectionism might feel depressingly inevitable in the gleaming, super-efficient first world of tournaments such as Germany 2006. It is considerably more jarring in a country where the vast majority of people could never dream of affording the cheapest match ticket, and where unofficial local World Cup merchandise really doesn't feel worth coming down upon like a ton of bricks. 
 
 Then again, Sepp Blatter & Co's priorities have always tended toward the skewed. When racist chanting rained down on England players during a 2004 friendly against Spain in Madrid, Fifa imposed a risible £44,750 fine on the Spanish FA. In that same year, Cameroon wore an unauthorised kit at the African Cup of Nations – an offence for which Fifa saw fit to fine the Cameroonian FA £86,000. 
 
 So with Fifa's charmless world view, there is every chance wearing a knock-off Bafana Bafana shirt counts as receiving stolen goods, and the Dutch ladies are advised to engage a top-flight lawyer as a matter of urgency.
– Dozens of Dutch football fans in miniskirts were escorted from a World Cup stadium and questioned for hours over what FIFA soccer officials say was an ambush marketing stunt. The 36 women wore orange dresses sold by Dutch beer maker Bavaria. The outfits had no branding on them apart from a small tag, but FIFA officials say the women were being used by the Dutch brewery to undercut Budweiser's exclusive sponsorship deal, the Guardian reports. "They tried to scare us by telling us that we had committed a crime, and that we had broken a law and that we could get six months jail for breaking this law," one of the women said. "Some girls were really scared, they were crying and calling their parents." A British TV pundit was fired for having supplied the miniskirted crew with tickets. Photos of the young women were splashed all over the front pages of South African newspapers the next day, proving the dangers of trying to crack down on ambush marketing, analysts tell AP.