[Infowarrior] - Brand Police Are on the Prowl for Ambush Marketers at London Games

[Richard Forno]

The Olympics are all about the sport, right?  Everyone who believes that who's NOT on the IOC or hosting committees, raise your hand......   --rick


Brand Police Are on the Prowl for Ambush Marketers at London Games
By DAVID SEGAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/sports/olympics/2012-london-games-brand-police-on-prowl-for-nike-and-other-ambush-marketers.html

LONDON — It is one of the fiercest contests at the Olympics, but it is not on any list of events. Every two years, the International Olympic Committee and the host city battle companies that want to bask in the Games’ prestige and global exposure but have not paid the small fortune required to be an official sponsor.

Ambush marketing, as it is called, has been around for decades, and no company has practiced this dark art with more verve and success than Nike. The triumphs of the sportswear giant, and other ambushers, have compelled the I.O.C. to impose ever more stringent rules to keep corporate crashers away from the party.

No city has drafted broader and more robust rules than the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which, with an assist from the British Parliament, criminalized the most egregious ambush tactics and made lesser offenses punishable with fines of $30,000 or more.

Since those laws were passed, the London organizing committee has been accused of protecting its sponsors with excessive zeal. But a larger question has remained: Would the rules work? Would they pass the toughest test of all by keeping a dedicated ambusher like Nike on the outside?

The answer, it appears, is yes.

At 7 a.m. Eastern Wednesday, Nike is scheduled to post a 60-second ad on YouTube that marks the worldwide unveiling of a campaign called “Find Your Greatness.” The ad takes an idea that would have run afoul of the rules and cheekily turns it on its head. Instead of showing Olympic athletes in action in London, England, viewers will see unknown athletes in towns and villages called London around the world.

Two men on bikes, for instance, are shown riding in London, Nigeria. Runners in London, Ontario, are seen cooling down after a marathon. There is a shot of London, Ohio, and Little London, Jamaica, and a few other Londons, accompanied by shots of a Little League pitcher, a guy doing situps and a menagerie of other unheralded warriors.

“There are no grand celebrations here, no speeches, no bright lights,” a narrator with an English accent intones. “But there are great athletes. Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is reserved for the chosen few, for the superstars. The truth is, greatness is for all of us.”

If there is a subtext, it translates to: “Don’t get all worked up about the Olympics, people. What really matters won’t happen in thatLondon, with all its pomp and medals.”

If you cannot join them, in other words, diminish them. Or needle them a little.

“The other way of putting it,” the Nike spokesman Charlie Brooks said in an interview Tuesday, “is that greatness doesn’t just happen in the stadiums of London. We’re saying that greatness can be anywhere for anyone and you can achieve it on your own terms.”

Regardless of its meaning, the campaign seems a little bizarre coming from Nike, which has perhaps done more to deify superstar athletes than any other company. But leave aside the dissonance. News that the best of the ambushers will apparently not attempt a surreptitious assault is sure to be regarded by the organizers of the London Games as evidence that the legal battlements erected in recent years are solid. Sponsors are a major source of financing for the Games’ roughly $14.4 billion price tag.

Nike’s campaign is also likely to come as a relief to its archrival Adidas, which reportedly spent about $62 million to be an Olympic sponsor.

Which is not say that Nike will be invisible here. The company sponsors the United States Olympic Committee, which means that every athlete will wear Nike gear around the village or during medal ceremonies. Nike also sponsors a number of American federations, including basketball, soccer, and track and field, so those athletes will compete in Nike clothing. Athletes of every country are allowed to use any brand of footwear they like. In short, expect to see plenty of swooshes when the competition begins.

And while Nike is abiding by the rules, a few of its sponsored athletes have already hashtagged their way into controversy. In June, the Advertising Standards Authority, a British ad watchdog, moved to censure a Twitter campaign by Nike-sponsored English soccer stars, including Wayne Rooney. One of his posts read: “My resolution — to start the year as a champion, and finish it as a champion... #makeitcount gonike.me/makeitcount.”

The standards group concluded that the post failed to make it clear that it was part of an advertisement. Nike has appealed the decision.

Athletes are prohibited from participating in any kind of advertising campaign during the Games, and federations from many countries have been reminding athletes of the rules in briefings when they arrive. But its hard to imagine how the I.O.C., or a country’s Olympic oversight body, would actually punish a social media offender. Stripping medals or blocking someone from competing seems an excessive punishment for a few Twitter posts.

An e-mail sent Tuesday to the I.O.C.’s press office was not returned in time for this article.

What explains Nike’s noncombatant status in the 2012 Olympics? Diplomacy might be part of it. There have been rumors that the company will be a sponsor in 2016 in Brazil — Brooks would not comment — and perhaps this does not seem like the right moment to infuriate the I.O.C.

Another explanation is simply that the rules established here, largely through acts of Parliament in 1995 and 2006, are working. It took more than two decades, but perhaps the I.O.C. is nearing its ideal of an ambush-proof Games.

“It’s fair to say that we’re conscious that anything we do should be within the guidelines,” Brooks said. “There are times when we’re sponsors of things and we expect other brands to play by the rules. Although we’ll always push the rules to the limit, we haven’t set out to break or disregard the rules that are in place.”

The most aggressive of the London rules is the one prohibiting anything that creates an association in the mind of consumers between a nonsponsor and the Olympics. That, according to experts, is a first.

“The concept of association is very wide — wider than trademark analysis, where you need to prove there is confusion or another consequence of the association,” said Adam Rendle a London lawyer at Taylor Wessing specializing in intellectual property and media. “Anything that looks like it’s attempting to free-ride on the Games, using Games imagery or anything that would create in the consumer’s mind the image of the Games, is at risk of creating an association.”

The rules can be awfully specific. Marketers could be in jeopardy if they use two of the next four words: “Games,” “two thousand and twelve,” “2012” and “twenty-twelve.” And using any one of those words in tandem with “London,” “medals,” “sponsors,” “summer,” “gold,” “silver” and “bronze” is a no-no.

This level of detail led the London authorities to pick a few well-publicized nits. A butcher in Weymouth, near a yachting competition site, was told to take down the five-ring Olympic logo he had made with images of sausage links. A lingerie seller in central England was asked to remove a display that showcased the rings using bras and mannequins as the Olympic torch passed by.

A modest backlash was inevitable.

“At my own university,” said Alan Tomlinson a professor at the University of Brighton, “because we’ve got a big sports studies program, we decided to have a series of lectures about the Games. But we couldn’t use the phrase ‘London 2012’ in the name because we would have been pounced on.”

He lamented what he called “legislatively backed brand protection” for top sponsors.

The protection is about to start. The Olympic Delivery Authority, which is responsible for, among other jobs, enforcing the branding rules during the Games, said it was dispatching 250 “specialist enforcement officers” to 28 sites. Their mission is to spot infractions and foil unsanctioned publicity stunts. That could mean interrupting giveaways or tearing down illicit advertisements.

“The enforcement officers only have powers within narrow ‘event zones’ stretching no more than 500m from venues,” wrote an Olympic authority representative in an e-mail. “While these regulations do seek to stop so-called ambush marketing, they are also there to prevent unauthorized trading near the Games venues to ensure a welcoming environment for spectators.”

Despite all these precautions and rules, other companies may go where Nike seems reluctant to tread. Nike is hardly the only ambusher — American Express, Qantas Airways and Kodak are among the many that have profited from similar stratagems over the years. Nobody, however, ambushes like Nike.

In 1996, the company executed what has been called “the ambush of all ambushes,” at the Atlanta Games, when it bought a number of billboards around event sites and built Nike Village in an office block not far from Olympic Park. It also handed out branded banners for the cheering throngs to wave in the stands. None of those moves would be possible now.

Its most recent victory came at the other quadrennial athletic extravaganza, the 2010 World Cup. For that, Nike produced “Write the Future,” a kinetic and wryly comic ad starring soccer stars from around the world, that made its debut in a three-minute version on the Internet. The ad set a record by racking up 7.9 million online views in one week, according to the Web analytics company Visible Measures.

The Nielsen Company later analyzed social media, including Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, and found that Nike wound up with 30 percent of the World Cup-related buzz. That bested Adidas, which had 14 percent — and was an official sponsor.



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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.