Who Sport What?

The USOC's Sweet Tooth

The USOC has signed a sponsorship deal with Hershey's chocolate. So alongside burger boxes and Coke cans, the Olympic rings  will now adorn.

It's easy to dismiss such deals as part of a world gone mad. The argument can be made that McDonald's and Coca-Cola now offer many more healthy choices than ever before. But healthy Hershey's chocolate? What's appropriate for kids growing up? A Kit Kat a day? A week? A month?

This is not the first foray into sports marketing for Hershey's, with the Reese's logo already plastered across a NASCAR team. And the USOC can hardly be expected to make a unilateral stand when all it relies on sponsorship for so much of its revenue. After all, Beijing 2008 is sponsored not just by Snickers, but by no less than three different beer companies.

General Motors Hits Olympic Brakes

General Motors has announced an end to its sponsorship of the U.S. Olympic Committee. GM also announced it would no longer commit to buying exclusive automaker status for advertising on NBC's telecasts of the Olympics.

The car giant cited a need for flexibility. Ad industry pundits have pointed to a need to avoid long term commitments and a switch from traditional TV sports: the exact model that Olympic finances have been built on since 1984.

Sponsorship and sports TV rights are inextricably linked. Broadcasters count on ad revenue from sponsors to cover the enormous sums they pay for the rights to cover events and leagues.

The deal had initially been done in 1997, in the lead-up to Salt Lake City 2002. GM's pullout will leave the USOC down some $5 million, or 7.5%, of its rights income per annum. NBC will now have as much as $100 million per Olympics in ad revenue to go find another buyer for in order to help make back the billions it is spending on televising Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 .

Just losing a sponsor, even a big one like GM, is no clear sign that the sky is falling in. But sports professionals everywhere will be looking to see if this is the start of a trend away from long term commitments and away from the traditional sponsor-an-event-and-buy-TV-airtime model. Four years ago, the ink had long since dried on the key U.S. TV deal for 2012. Today, nothing looks certain for 2016.

The Olympic Games and the Wimbledon tennis championships share a rare position of not selling advertising via hoardings in stadiums, on uniforms and on equipment, forcing all the action to take place during ad breaks that are fast losing their effectiveness. How much longer will the model hold? More importantly still, where are the ideas for replacing it? 

Update: London Logo Floors People

Update: Seemed that London Olympics logo was a bit too good at jumping off the page. A movie clip based on the logo has had to be pulled after eight people suffered epileptic fits while watching it. News report.

London's New Olympic Face

A new logo was unveiled for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games today. Most people seeem to think it looks just horrible. Let's compare it with those that have gone before. London 1908 didn't have a logo, but the last London Games did:

More recent logos have sought to maintain that bold yet simple link with the host city. The running man Chinese script character in Beijing's logo is a typical example:

  Clearly a new departure, then. But resistance to change is not the only apparent source of dismay at the new design.

It's really not hard to see why many dislike London's new logo. The graphical link to London itself is not clear. It works much better in dynamic form than standing still. The logo does away with the tradition of incorporating the colors of the Olympic rings, too, and so might be said to dilute the Olympic brand itself. It's also too easy to knock the launch, with an lack of opportunities for easy interaction: there's  nothing to download and play with. Nothing to share. No screensaver for my mobile phone. Just a bunch of brand protection small print. Even London 2012's online press release had no logo link.

So the logo itself is resolutely, perhaps defiantly modern. To this extent it is reminiscent of the atonal, dissonant screeching and clanging that passes for that wonderful contradiction,   modern classical music. That's useful: the modern Olympic Games have not been modern for a really long time. As an ethereal and temporary event, the Olympic Games seem to have a more tangible past than future. But modernisation will only work if it directly helps youth reconnect with traditional sport, while making adults more active. That's the goal. To meet it, London's real challenge with the Olympic brand is not updating classical but recreating pop.