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

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

Coca-Cola is helping China select torchbearers and escort runners for the Beijing Olympics.

In August, Coca-Cola launched two bottling plants in China’s eastern Jiangxi Province and the northwestern Xinjiang province, which made the total number of Coca-Cola’s factories in China reach 37.

Coca-Cola entered China in 1928. In the same year, Coca-Cola became the Chinese Olympic delegation’s sponsor.

Now, the world’s largest beverage company, which recently launched an $80 million global research center and new China headquarters in Shanghai, is planning to boost investment in sales infrastructure and product range in the country, a market that could become Coca-Cola’s largest, the company says.

Doug Jackson, who became president of Coca-Cola China in April, said, ‘Our goal in the next few years is to sustain the current strong growth momentum. The non-alcohol drink market grows by 14 to 15% a year in China, and we hope we can outdo the average market performance to increase our sales volume and market share. We are also planning to expand our product range and provide more choices for our customers.

‘We believe that China could become the largest market for Coca-Cola, however, it is hard to predict when it will happen, but it certainly will. Our long-term vision is to make China our largest market.’

And one way of making the vision happen is spending a considerable amount of its marketing budget on the Olympics.
Source: China Daily

When Coca-Cola executives met with the Beijing Olympic Committee in 2002 for a status report on the first anniversary of the city’s winning bid, China was Coke’s sixth largest market. Today, a year away from opening ceremonies for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, China has moved to No. 4 — and is still growing.

(It is no part of this editorial to discuss the health effects of Coke consumption and whether such a product should be associated with an important sporting event of world stature.)

Per capita consumption in China has grown as follows.

2002: 10; 2003: 12; 2004: 15; 2005: 18; 2006: 20

Coke’s sponsorship of the Games is a key component of the company’s global sports marketing program. Coke wishes to push its 200 brands deeper into consumers’ consciousness.

Paul Etchells, deputy group president for Coca-Cola Pacific, said, ‘This will be the biggest Olympics ever as well, I think, in terms of almost any measure. The number of athletes, the number of spectators, the number of media people who are forecast to come to China during the games.

We talk about the legacies in relation to the Olympics. In other words, what is it about our Olympics activation that’s going to survive the Olympics and is going to make a difference beyond August 2008. And the principal legacy has got to be the consumer view of our brands.

‘There are a very large number of outlets and it’s a three-week window during which these outlets are open and you have to ensure that you are up and running by the opening of the Olympics and that the execution during the Olympics is flawless. You realize there is a very large behind-the-scenes element in terms of the logistics . . . You visage immediately selling products to consumers, to spectators, but you have to provide products to the whole Olympic family — all the athletes, all the team managers, etc. So, a very large number of people, quite a complex logistics exercise.’

The mind boggles.
Source: AJC

Adidas hopes to make hay while the Olympics shine and is looking to more than double the number of its retail outlets on the mainland by 2010 as a result of the Olympic effect.

It has been a bit of a slow start but more than a decade after Adidas sneakers were first introduced at a shopping mall in Beijing, the brand has now become a household name.

The success of Adidas in China coincides with the country’s growing enthusiasm for sports.

Nationwide, there are more than 2,500 Adidas outlets in 300 Chinese cities attract millions of sports fans. Adidas, is the world’s No.2 sporting goods maker after Nike and is expecting the number of its outlets in China to grow to over 5,000 by 2010.

Adidas, which has been the official supplier of the World Cup since 1970, is also committed to the Olympic Movement. The partnership between the Olympics and the company dates back to the 1928 Amsterdam Games.

On January 24, 2005, Adidas signed a deal with the Organizing Committee of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games to became one of 11 official partners of the 2008 Olympics.

The German company is estimated to have paid as much as $100 million in cash and extras such as uniforms to win the Beijing Olympics sponsorship bid. The company will supply approximately 40,000 volunteers, staff and technical officials with sportswear. The illustration is of an Adidas factory in Suzhou which is no doubt going flat out to cope with the expected demand.

Note that in this article Adidas is spelled thus. In fact, it was registered as ‘adidas’ and was one of the first companies with such a damn silly idea regarding capitalization of a name. Since when it has spread like a disease.

Adidas was founded by Adi Dassler in the 1920s in Herzogenaurach, near Nuremberg. His brother, Rudolf Dassler, who worked with him, later formed the other shoe company, Puma and became a bitter rival.
Source: China Daily