Matt Carr
The London Olympic Organising Committee (Locog) may not have sufficient security personnel, and it doesn’t even seem to know how many it actually needs. But no one can say the organizers don’t have a sense of priority.
Next week 300 Locog ‘enforcement officers’ will fan out across the country in an attempt to eliminate any unauthorised ‘association’ with the 2012 Olympiad.
Under the terms of the 2006 London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, these ‘brand police’ will be able to impose fines of £20,000 on businesses, shops and charities that engage in such activities.
They can also penalise athletes who mention brands not included with the official sponsorship roster, and prevent the unauthorised use of ‘listed words’ such as ‘London’, ‘London Twenty Twelve’, ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Bronze’ and, most ludicrously, ‘summer.’
Luckily, if you live in ‘Gold Street’ or ‘Silver Road’, you can still say so. But if you are an airline company, you better not hand out complimentary t-shirts saying ‘flying you to London, Olympic host city’.
Don’t put up posters saying ‘backing the 2012 Games’ or ‘supporting the London Olympics’ or you will have to take it down, as the University of Derby was told to do this April. And woe betide a hotel that offers a ’10 per cent discount for London 2012.’
These obsessive restrictions form part of a censorship regime that one might associate with China or North Korea, and which calls into question Locog’s representation of the Games as a promotional platform and an engine of economic regeneration for London (or should that be ‘the capital’) and the country as a whole.
The idea that giant multinationals like Dow Chemicals, McDonald’s and Proctor & Gamble need ‘protecting’ is ludicrous, since they are already guaranteed unrivalled publicity even without Locog’s attempts to enforce their monopoly.
Why should a pub, a hotel or a restaurant – or a charity – not be able to make money from the Games too, as long as they aren’t engaging in fraud or producing counterfeit products?
Locog and the Government insist that the Olympiad is intended to ‘inspire’ the nation. Yet it is barely permitted even to proclaim in public that you back or support the Games without running the risk of legal action from Locog’s brand enforcers.
In May an 81-year-old Norfolk woman was ordered to withdraw a doll wearing a hand-knitted 2012 running kit that she intended to sell for £1 to raise money for a church fundraising sale – or face the consequences. So much for Olympic universality.
One suspects that this is not quite what Baron de Coubertin had in mind when he founded the International Olympic Committee. And it really does raise the question of whether the London Olympics is really the “people’s games” at all – or whether it is nothing more than a giant shop window for large corporations that see everything as a potential marketing opportunity.
Matt Carr is a writer and journalist. His books include ‘The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism’ and the forthcoming ‘Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent’. He blogs regularly at
www.infernalmachine.co.uk
Karen Earl
It’s important to remember that events like the Olympics would not be possible without sponsorship funding. Of Locog’s c.£2bn operating budget, over £700m is met by sponsors and it’s crucial that the rights for which these sponsors have paid so much are protected against other companies who try to pass themselves off as official or connected to the Games in some way – ambush marketing in other words.
Some will remember the clash which erupted in 1992 between Visa and American Express over the winter Olympics in Albertville, France. Visa was the official sponsor of the Games; American Express launched a series of advertisements which tried to convince the public that it was the official credit card of the Games. Visa had paid a reported $20 million dollars for its Olympic rights – money vital to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in staging the Games. Quite rightly, IOC took American Express to court and won.
Perhaps it’s worth considering the implications if the IOC had either not taken the case to the courts, or if it had not won. Quite simply, Visa would not have continued its sponsorship of the Games in the future. It could also have sued the IOC for a breach of contract – one imagines an eye-watering amount in settlement. Arguably, the IOC might have been able to afford that one case, but that would not have been the end of it. All its other Games sponsors would have spoken with their feet – and left. It’s doubtful whether the Olympic Games movement could have recovered from such a situation.
So, quite simply put, sponsors of the Olympic Games pay a great deal of money to be official partners of an event which has the eyes of the world upon it. The benefits are huge. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t do it.
The IOC and its staging partners – in this case, Locog – have a legal obligation to protect those sponsors and the rights they’ve purchased.
The public doesn’t always understand a sometimes high-handed approach to the protection of those rights but without it there might never be another Olympic Games – or a football World Cup, or an F1 Grand Prix or any number of sporting events we enjoy on a weekly and annual basis. That’s the message. And, once the public understands it, they’ll understand why they are only offered Coca-Cola and its sister products, only able to use a Visa card, only ….. and so it goes on. Without those products there’d be no Games in London in nine days’ time.
Karen Earl is chairman of the European Sponsorship Association. She has worked in the sponsorship industry for over 35 years, starting her own agency, Karen Earl Sponsorship, in 1984. The agency was renamed as Synergy in 2008 and is now part of Engine.
www.sponsorship.org
*This article was amended to clarify the £2bn figure quoted by Karen Earl. This cost of the staging of the Games is separate to the publicly-funded £9.3bn budgeted in 2007 for venues and infrastructure, which rose to around £11bn earlier this year.
