A dozen multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Lenovo, McDonald’s, and Samsung have laid out as much as $100 million each to be global sponsors of the Beijing Olympics this summer. An additional 11 — including Volkswagen, Adidas, and Air China — have paid as much as $50 million each for the right to link ads within China to the Games.

Dozens of other companies have less extensive tie-ups, ranging from the ‘official wine supplier’ (Great Wall) to Guangzhou Liby Enterprise Group, which is an official provider of detergent for sheets, shorts, and other laundry.

The problem for sponsors is that plenty of other companies think the Olympics are just as attractive — and are finding unofficial ways to link their brands to the Games.

Nike has endorsement deals with Athens gold medal hurdler Liu Xiang and other Chinese athletes. Part of its campaign is in our illustration.
Sneaker-maker Li Ning (named after its founder, an Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics) runs TV spots featuring gymnasts and basketball players and is sponsoring the U.S. Olympic Ping-Pong team.
PepsiCo got 160 million online votes from mainlanders in a contest ranking mug shots sent in by fans; the winning entries will be printed on cans cheering on Team China. And Pepsi has replaced its traditional blue cans in the mainland with red ones ‘to show our respect to the year of China,’ says Harry Hui, Pepsi’s marketing chief in China.

It works.

Qantas did it to Ansett Airlines in the 2000 Olympics. Ansett died, Qantas went from strength to strength.

Most ambush marketers do what Qantas did and simply deploy images of athletes. Thousands of Chinese polled by research firm Ipsos say they believe Pepsi, Nokia, and Li Ning are linked to the games, though they aren’t. That’s important because roughly three-quarters of Chinese consumers say they would give preference to products they associate with the Olympics, Beijing consultancy R3 reports.

It doesn’t help that the Beijing organizing committee offers five levels of sponsorship, and a total of 49 companies have signed up.
Source: BusinessWeek

China’s state-run national television broadcaster is teaming with two Internet ventures to deal with droves of online viewers who will be watching the Olympic Games.

China Central Television has announced it is working with the MySpace China social-networking site and online-video site Tudou.com to run an interactive Web site for the August Games.

The CCTV site will offer streaming video broadcasts of events, which will be viewable only in China. The Web site of CCTV, the monopoly national broadcaster, draws relatively little traffic.

There is a conflict of interest in all of this.

Around the world Internet users want to view the Olympics. The Web offers new opportunities for advertising revenue, but also threatens to detract from the lock on Olympic viewers long enjoyed by TV. Selling TV rights is the major source of income for the International Olympic Committee.

The IOC didn’t sell audio and video transmissions rights for Olympics competitions over the Web until 2000.

In many markets like the U.S., the IOC now generally offers the Internet and wireless-broadcast rights for the Games bundled with TV rights, but that is beginning to change. An open tender on the online rights in China last year, which was eventually won by CCTV, was among the first.

CCTV’s Olympics Web site will be a dedicated one within CCTV.com, with a video channel supported by Tudou.com, a three-year-old start-up, and a social-networking section supported by MySpace China, which was launched last April in a joint venture with News Corp., the part of the Murdoch empire which is still interested in China.

The Olympics video site — to go live August 8, the first day of the Games — will include live video, playbacks from the Games, commentary and user-generated content. Users will be able to interact with athletes and coaches using the MySpace China part of the site.

However there may be problems regarding exclusivity.

China’s Internet is home to numerous services that illegally broadcast copyrighted TV shows or movies — even whole TV channels.

Christopher Stokes, the chief executive of United Kingdom-based NetResult, which helps companies enforce sports rights, said, ‘At this stage nobody knows who is going to do the work of making sure the videos are legal.’
Source: Wall Street Journal

BOCOG issued a written proposal aimed at joint anti-ambush marketing work efforts during a symposium on anti-ambush marketing for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Representatives of the Olympic worldwide partners and the partners and sponsors of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games enthusiastically accepted the proposal.

At the symposium, representatives of the BOCOG marketing and legal affairs departments discussed with those present the anti-ambush marketing work efforts over the course of 2007, including the thought processes and strategy. Representatives from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce also offered suggestions regarding the protection of intellectual property rights.

Next year will be the decisive year of battle for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, and brand protection remains a significant task. In the proposal, BOCOG explicitly states the following:

The Olympic worldwide partners and Beijing 2008 Olympic partners and sponsors do not engage in any kind of activity that would promote ambush marketing.
The various industry associations actively develop Olympic brand protection as well as activities and promotional efforts surrounding anti-ambush marketing education
Advertising agencies should increase their understanding of Olympic marketing regulations, respect professional ethics, and not engage in ambush marketing activities.

The problem is the main players — those who will be doing the ambush marketing — were not present.

An example of how it works: At the 200 Olympic Games Qantas took all the credit although the official sponsor airline was Ansett which is no longer with us. Look at the illustration above and wonder whether Qantas was a sponsor. It was not.

Already Acer is hammering out press releases about it being an Olympic Sponsor. Not of Beijing but of the London Olympics and other that lie ahead.

If Lenovo is not careful then Acer will appear to be a sponsor of the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing which will not, from the point of view of Lenovo, be a good thing.

Ambush marketing is easy to spot, difficult to define, damn near impossible to stop. There is an excellent article by Jeremy Curthoys and Christopher N. Kendallon how it was used in the Australian Olympics in Ambush Marketing and the Sydney Games. It was from this article our illustration of Cathy Freeman apparently running for Qantas, which was not an Olympics sponsor, is taken.
Source: Beijing 2008

China’s two largest websites are having a battle — nothing physical — over Olympic advertising sales rights.

In one corner, Sohu, the Internet content sponsor of the Beijing Games, claims that online ads from other sponsors with the Beijing Olympics logo can only appear on its website. As our illustration shows Charles Zhang for Sohu signed an agreement to that effect in Beijing, in November, 2005.

In the opposite corner Sina says it plans to boost its Olympic content — no law against that — and also its development and marketing to attract all kinds of advertisers. And, of course, most of these will be Olympic advertisers.

Sina and its partners have also contested Sohu’s claim of exclusivity. They say Sohu’s sponsorship only entitles it to create the official website for BOCOG and to use the Beijing Games logo of a running man in its marketing.

Olympic organizers have confirmed Sohu’s marketing rights as an Olympic sponsor, such as its eligibility to use the Olympic logo. It has also promised crackdowns on any company that tries to establish or imply an association with the Games without paying any royalties.

Sina has since toned down its ‘Olympic marketing’ publicity campaign.

Olympic marketing officials have yet to confirm that Sohu.com owns the exclusive rights to carry online ads from other Olympic sponsors.

Sina says it plans to deploy a 450-strong team to cover the Games in Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic.

Sohu has dismissed Sina’s strategies. It uses the analogy of ‘a regular army to a small band of guerrillas’ when comparing itself to Sina in terms of Olympic news coverage. That is a pretty dangerous analogy to use. Guerrillas have hammered regular armies many times. Read up on Chinese history to see some star examples.

All of which is reminiscent of the Australian Olympics. Qantas was not an official sponsor. But no Australian can tell you what airline paid for that privelege. All the advertising from Qantas seemed to suggest that it was the official carrier. Without directly saying so to the 3.8 billion viewers who watched the games on television. And the advertisements were pretty much all Qantas.

The official sponsor was Ansett Airlines. Which has now gone out of business. Qantas is the official Olympic carrier for the Beijing Games. Not all of the action at an Olympic Games is of a sporting nature.
Source: China Daily

From blogs you can get interesting information and new knowledge. On the Huffington Post an interview which had been made for CNBC appears with a link to a clip of the interview. Sadly you have to join to view it. The link is CNBC.

In it the marketing people from Nike and Adidas explain their positions on the Olympics.

Charlie Denson, Nike Brand President said the retail opportunity in China is almost immeasurable. He said, ‘I don’t think anyone has seen anything like what China is today.’

Then comes the conflict. Adidas has paid tens of millions for the podium rights to all of the Chinese Olympic teams. Nike has decided to do deals with 22 of 28 Chinese teams so that they’ll compete in Nike gear — even though they’ll be wearing Adidas on the podium.

To Charlie Denson that seems not to be a big problem in the greater scheme of things. He said, ‘The Olympics are a great point in time and the Beijing Olympics are going to transcend the world of sport. They will become a monumental event throughout the world. It represents an incredible opportunity for us as a brand to participate in the world of sport at the highest level on the biggest stage. It’s a great checkpoint for us but it’s not a destination.’

That last sentence is pure marketing-speak. It doesn’t mean much but it sounds terrific.

Representing, as it were, the opposition, Paul Pi, Adidas vice president of marketing, Greater China said, ‘We have more than 3,500 shops Adidas shops in China today. We had less than 100 stores eight or nine years ago. We’re growing an average of opening two shops per day. That’s a phenomenal number if you compare that to other benchmarks around the world. We’re opening at least 600 locations around the nation and we’ve been doing that for several years. So in 2010, we forecast that we’ll have well over 5,000 Adidas locations in China.’
Source: Huffington Post