Do you have Olympic fever? Advertisers hope you do. Official sponsors of the 2012 London Olympic Games, like McDonald’s, Samsung, Omega, and Acer, among others, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for marketing rights to the Games. In addition to their efforts to capture your attention, there are plenty of ambush marketing tactics being used to promote other companies and brands during the Games.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has plans to stop these efforts and, according to Marketing Week, has employed almost 300 hundred people to monitor vendors operating near the Olympic sites around London. These brand monitors have the authority to place tape over brand logos if companies are found guilty of ignoring the regulations. All outdoor advertising within 500 meters of Olympic venues has been sold out in recent weeks and more than half of those ads are from non-sponsors.
You can always expect to see marketing activities by non-sponsor companies that might possibly challenge the IOC guidelines. A Scottish brewing company called BrewDog launched a “Never Mind the Anabolics” Pale Ale with a label featuring some round shapes … or some might say, rings. The beer’s website says: “Never Mind the Anabolics takes its lead from the relentless marketing campaigns of global fast-food chains and international mass production breweries that replace the sporting spirit with a fast buck, a greasy burger and an ugly plastic cup of insipid, fizzy, yellow lager. So we decided to give the athletes something that was going to make them happier and better. A way to relax before a big event and at the same time increase the chances of winning.”
Nike is running a series of YouTube ads featuring athletes in towns around the world that are also named London — London, Ohio; Little London, Jamaica; London, Norway, and others. The campaign’s theme is “Find your greatness” and includes the message, “Greatness is not in one special place. And it’s not in one special person.”
Take a look:
What event at the 2012 London Olympic Games are you most looking forward to?
