The Debate: Have Olympic sponsorship regulations gone too far?

(GETTY IMAGES)

With only nine days days to go until the opening ceremony and ten until the events themselves begin, the wait for the London Olympics is nearly over. Come next Friday, London will be catapulted into the spotlight, and we must make sure that all of our dearly-held traditions and the hallmarks of our culture are fully represented.

Rain? Check.

Transport chaos? Check.

Unrealistic optimism in our nation’s sporting ability? Check.

Another thing Brits are great at is complaining. Maybe it’s just in London, but the Olympics seem to have given us the best excuse for a collective rant that we’ve had for a long time. Or since Euro 2012 last month, at least.

While last week’s moans turned to the poor preparations of security contractors G4S, the last few days have seen attention focusing on the restrictions placed on athletes, spectators, businesses, charities, your dinner, your clothes, your girlfriend and  your dog over what they can and can’t do in association with the Olympics.

It emerged this week that Britain would become flooded with ‘brand police’ in order to protect sponsorship deals, not just in the Olympic Park, but across the country as a whole, making sure that no one is implying an association with the Games when they are not an official partner.

Without the massive input from multi-nationals and their sponsorship deals there would be a struggle to foot the bill for this momentous event, but this latest news has led to the obvious cries about the corporisation of sport and the true meaning behind a supposedly unifying global event being lost to commercial interests.

So have the Olympic Delivery Authory (ODA) gone too far in protecting sponsors? Here, Matt Carr sees the restrictions as nothing less than censorship and completely at odds with the spirit of the “people’s games,” while Karen Earl argues, in short, that the Games simply could not go ahead without the backing of these giant corporations, and for that, they deserve to have their interests protected.

Who do you agree with? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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.

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• janlog

  I recall a time:
  When athletics competitions were open only to amateurs. That’s gone.
  When sponsorship was just that – not a restrictive practice to gain a monopoly, no matter how we, the consumers, feel about their fast food.
  The innocence of the Olympics is gone. Nobody is ever going to write a Chariots of Fire story about any of the modern games. Sad.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697515661 Lin Lee

  Last summer major disruption came to some of our cities when young people in strange clothing brought chaos to the streets. Honest, hard working businessmen had their businesses disrupted, sometimes devastated but the actions of a few thoughtless individuals who may, or may not, have had a cause to proclaim. Individuals and businesses alike were robbed, ripped off, lives made misery by the actions the few. We called them “rioters” and “looters” and the government went to extraordinary lengths to ensure they were rounded up and prosecuted, they, their friends and families.

  This summer it’s happening again, except this time it’s not hoodies, it’s purple caps and shirts, they’re not “rioters” or “looters” they’re LOCOG and LDA. They may not be causing mass destruction of property, but they are going to extraordinary lengths to proclaim their message this time they have the support of the government to bring disruption to the lives of individuals and honest hard working businessmen. They don’t care who gets ripped off by the big businesses who have paid their bribes to have their business interests protected (sorry, who have sponsored the games) and far from being rounded up and prosecuted for the damage they are doing, they will probably all be given awards and honours.

• http://twitter.com/hrrl HRRL tweets!

  Matt wins by a landslide, even after understating the case. Yes the games have to be paid for, but pandering to the ever-more powerful Corporate brands is self-perpetuating and self defeating. I am sooo glad I didn’t get any tickets but soo sad that the Olympic ideal has been so sadly undermined. But I refuse to be force-fed McD chips and Heineken “beer”. I’ll enjoy the sport, on the BBC at home and at the pub, drinking and eating just what I like, sans adverts!

• hoinarylup

  The sponsors are putting up roughly 12% of the cost of the event, according to one set of figures. They are getting pretty unrestricted advertising rights as a result. Taxpayers are putting up the other 88%, and are subject to drastic legal restrictions about what we may or may not say. That’s not right. Even if the figures I’ve quoted are wrong, and the costs are more evenly split, it’s still not right.

  If it’s not possible to put a major sporting event on without this sort of thing, then better not put them on. The whole thing looks like a suspicious combination of bread, circuses and repression.

• I_See_Dead_Truth

  Steve, you say – “Unrealistic optimism in our nation’s sporting ability? Check.”

  What’s wrong with supporting our own side and egging them on? Perhaps if enough people got behind their own nation then it would stand a better chance.

• acg44

  We seem to have been able to cope without tobacco companies sponsoring every other sporting event, so now that obesity is probably the No. 1 health problem perhaps a more ethical approach to fast food and fizzy drinks sponsors is overdue?

• BusyBeeBuzz

  I wonder how much she earns (before bonuses)?

• I_See_Dead_Truth

  I would like to point out an oversight with regards to the sale of items such as coca cola and McDonalds.

  McDonalds cannot actually prevent ANYONE from selling chips…McDonalds do not actually sell chips, they sell French Fries. “Chips” and “French Fries” are two vastly different products. The difference is in the preparation. “French Fries” are sliced much thinner and cooked for a longer period than “chips”. McDonalds recognise this and have named their product accordingly as “French Fries”. So to those 800 venues being banned from selling “chips” because of McDonalds…sell chips and not French Fries and you will be fine…not fined.

  As for Coca Cola, I do not believe there is a patent on “Cola”.

• http://www.facebook.com/paul.connorkearns Paul Connor Kearns

  The Olympics, as with the vast majority of professional sport, became absorbed and subjugated by the corporate machine quite a while ago. It just part of the rancid, sugar-coated gruel that is fed to the populous to distract from the underlying feeling that we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the journey.

• VicTheBrit

  I think these sponsors (and LOCOG) should tread a lot more carefully as there could be a viral backlash against them by the average punter who may choose to wear Pepsi or BurgerKing T-shirts while visiting the the branded advertising, sorry… SPORTS events this summer. What are the brand police gonna do?