The days of Notting Hill Carnival providing a free platform for marketing goods and services may be numbered. Steve Pascal, CEO of London Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, told Soca News that the Board has lost patience with companies exploiting Carnival and giving nothing back in return.

Notting Hill has for many years provided a unique opportunity for companies to market their soft drinks, clothing, beer, music, financial services etc to a high-spending multinational crowd at minimum cost. No other event in Europe can concentrate more than a million potential customers in such a small area every year.

Perhaps the best-known use of Carnival as a launch-pad for a new product came in 1982, when The Voice burst on the scene to transform ethnic journalism in the UK. This year, Underground stations and bridges in Notting Hill will be carrying the new logo for urban radio station Choice FM, which is launching its “younger, fresher” brand identity at Carnival. According to Marketing Week, the station is repositioning itself as “fun-loving and humorous with a female bias”. Red Stripe also understands the value Notting Hill brings to its brand, dubbing itself the “official beer of Carnival”.

A black newspaper, a black radio station and a Jamaican beer do at least have an obvious affinity with Carnival, but the connection between Europe’s greatest celebration of black culture and a company selling kitchen equipment is hard to fathom.

Pascal emphasises that there is no fundamental objection to companies using the event for promoting themselves – indeed, this is an essential component of the vision to make Notting Hill self-sustaining – only to firms exploiting Carnival without permission, without acknowledgement and without payment. In future, Pascal says, the Notting Hill Carnival “brand” will be protected far more vigorously from those who want to ride the bandwagon without paying the fare.

LNHCL also intends to promote the Notting Hill Carnival brand in its own right. Several commercial opportunities have already been identified, such as hiring out experienced carnival stewards for other events. LNHCL is also exploring the possibility of wholesaling mas-making materials to other carnivals in Britain and abroad.

The problem Pascal and his team have to overcome is the perception that, because there is no charge to attend Notting Hill Carnival and no clearly defined single “owner” of the event, it therefore has no commercial value of its own. LNHCL must both to assign a value to Carnival and have the power to license and control its brand. For this it needs the active support and co-operation of the two councils, the Mayor and Transport for London – otherwise, unscrupulous companies can simply plaster buildings and bridges with unlicensed advertising with impunity.

The next logical step would seem to be the appointment of an experienced and tough-minded marketing manager to oversee the commercial development of Notting Hill Carnival in a way that benefits the event and rewards its hard-working but eternally under-resourced participants. Experience comes at a price, but it is a cost that will have to be borne if ever Carnival is to move from the financial sick-bed, dependent on a meagre drip-feed of handouts, into robust economic health, able to determine its own destiny.