London Olympics 2012 Sponsors

It seems that most of the businesses and marketers are under dark about the legality of advertising and marketing activities related to Olympic Games. No doubt, the London Olympics, 2012 are offering some of the best marketing and advertising opportunities for the local businesses of London and the UK but lack of awareness about the London Olympics Marketing Rules may put you into trouble.

Branding police is in action and they will make sure that the guerrilla marketers and advertisers aren't able to eat a pie from the participating brands, which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help stage the games. London wants to make sure that the rights of such sponsors such as VISA, McDonald's and Samsung are protected. This might mean imposition of heavy penalties for the businesses breaching the rules.

Different categories of London 2012 Olympics sponsors

Officially, the London Olympic Games' official sponsors are categorized under four subdivisions to streamline the advertising activities. These are called 'official worldwide partners, official partners, official supporters, official suppliers and providers.'

The secured sponsors under London Olympics Worldwide Partners category are, Coca-Cola, Panasonic, P&G, Atos Origin, McDonalds, Acer, Omega, Dow, GE, Visa and Samsung. The domestic partners include also referred to as official partners are BP (British Petroleum), EDF, Lloyds TSB, BMW, Adidas, BT (British telecomm) and British Airways. The official supporters include Adecco, Deloitte, Thomas Cook, Arcelor Mittal, Cadbury, Cisco, and UPS.

The brands ranked under the fourth category 'Official Suppliers and Providers' are Airwave, Atkins, The Boston Consulting Group, CBS Outdoor, Crystal CG, Eurostar, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, Holiday Inn, Mondo, Populous, John Lewis, McCann Worldgroup, Next, The Nielsen Company, Technogym, Ticketmaster and Trident.

These brands are legally allowed to associate themselves with the London Olympics brand. It includes using the emblem and other symbols too. Some of the plans to restrict the nonparticipant brands to take advantage of Olympic season include preventing spectators from prominently displaying a competing (nonparticipant) brand on their tees or other clothing. So, the visitors and spectators are advised not to wear tees with logos, symbols and messages of nonparticipant brands.

McDonald's Ambitious Golden Arches
This Olympic season the world's biggest McDonald's will be displayed for you. One of the main Olympic sponsors McDonald's would open its largest franchise in the world. It would be a double storied Golden Arches at the Olympic Park with a sprawling 33,000sq. foot space and around 1,500 seats to accommodate visitors.

London Olympics Marketing Rules
According to the London Olympics marketing rules, the athletes are prohibited from Tweeting about non- participant brands to discourage any activity which can hurt the interests and financial objectives of official sponsors. In an interesting step, the organizers have arranged for only VISA credit cards to be accepted at the Olympic venues.

The brand policing will target the companies that use signage or mimicry of symbols, emblems or marketing messages that in any way hint at the London Olympics. It covers the existing corporate stadium names and logos on toilets and hand dryers too.

While the regular in store promotion and marketing will go on as usual, the gag orders are preventing the businesses to use their existing names and signs too, even if they resemble the word 'Olympic'. Though, it is being told that all the brand policing and tighter restrictions are being imposed to prevent ambush marketing only. So, the businesses are obviously unhappy when a 'Cafe Olympic' is asked to change to' Cafe Lympic', according to a report in Huffington Post dot com.



Last Updated on 8/6/2012