Arthur Solomon was a Senior Vice President/Senior Counselor at Burson-Marsteller, where he handled national and international accounts and traveled worldwide with top foreign government and Olympic officials as a media consultant. He is available at arthursolomon4pr [at] juno.com.
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Aug. 14, 2012 |
LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE LONDON OLYMPICS |
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By Arthur Solomon
Now that the latest edition of the world’s most important, commercialized and politicized sports gathering has concluded (did someone say hypocritical?), there are many Lessons Learned that sports marketers and PR people should remember before the Winter Olympics emerges from its hibernation.
But before we get to the lessons, there is one certainty still to come: marketers will give general statements about how the millions of dollars spent benefited their brands without providing any specifics. Why am I sure of this? The Groundhog Day like statements are as much part of the Olympics as the opening and closing ceremonies.
Now to the Lessons Learned, along with abundant personal musings:
- It appears that the IOC’s promise of benefits to the host city didn’t materialize. Prices for hotels, airlines and vacation packages were greatly reduced weeks before the competitions; also a half-million soccer tickets were withdrawn by the organizing committee because they were unsold.
- It also appears that the IOC will again leave a host city holding the financial bag: The cost of staging the games was estimated at $14 billion, triple the anticipated price tag when London won the rights for the multi-faceted sporting event in 2005.
- There were many stories about the IOC’s refusal to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Israeli’s killed at the Munich games during the opening ceremonies, (even though IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch made reference to the slaughter of Israeli athletes during the closing ceremonies of the summer games of 1996 in Atlanta) because the IOC said politics is not part of the Olympics. (Cynics, like me, believe the real reason was because they didn’t want to upset the Arab countries.) During the opening ceremony telecast, Bob Costas strongly opined that the proper time to commemorate the killing of Israeli athletes was during the ceremony, as did many print journalists prior to and throughout the games. But the patter between Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira leading up the parade of nations was lame, and NBC’s lead-in to the telecast was pompous, “1896ish” and boring.
- However, NBC’s opening ceremony team of Costas and Lauer acted as newsmen should and pulled no punches about the political problems of countries during the parade of nations. Costas was clearly the star of the telecast, injecting humor into his comments throughout the march of the 204 nations.
- The way NBC commentator’s fawned over the rebranded royal family made me wonder if they would have preferred that America had not had a revolution.
NBC’s Dream Team salute and Mary Carillo’s slice of life features were television at its best.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that the television audience for the Olympics does not reach the usual target audiences, meaning that additional and expensive efforts are needed by some sponsors.
- There were many stories referencing how the IOC was a willing partner to despotic regimes that used the Olympics to burnish their image.
- Disputing the IOC’s claim that there is no politics in the Olympics, the North Korean women’s soccer team walked out of the arena when the South Korean flag was mistakenly displayed. Stories said that they agreed to play only after receiving an okay from their “supreme leader.”
- More proof of the ridiculousness of the IOC assertion that the Olympic is free of politics: the judo team from Lebanon demanded that a partition be erected so that they don’t have to see Israeli athletes training and the Olympic powers caved in. Also, Iran said it will not allow its athletes to compete against Israelis.
- The morning after the opening ceremonies, NPR, long accused of having a pro-Arab, anti-Israel news slant, did about 20 minutes on the Olympics without once mentioning the controversy about the IOC’s refusal to commemorate the slaughter of Israeli athletes during the Munich games.
- More proof that the Olympics and politics do mix: Prior to the beginning of the games, the BBC Olympic website, which features profiles of Olympic countries, listed East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and listed no capital for Israel -- the only country with no capital listed. The site was amended only after complaints from the public and the Israeli government.
- Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin used CNN’s Candy Crowley show to use Mitt Romney’s Olympic flub as an example of Romney’s lack of foreign experience, forgetting that Obama had no foreign experience when he was elected and Obama also has failed to do what he said he would do regarding foreign matters.
- The way GOP spokespeople lauded Romany’s Salt Lake City Olympics experience made me wonder if he had decided to quit the presidential race and instead run for president of the IOC.
- Past U.S. gold medalists Kristi Yamaguchi, Derek Para and Jimmy Shea appeared in a pro-Romney commercial, giving new meaning to the Olympic Solidarity program.
- President Obama, who sent his wife to the Olympics, visited the USOC training Center, and telephoned or text U.S. gold medal winners to congratulate them. Sen. Marco Rubio introduced The Olympic Tax Elimination Act, which would exempt medal winners from paying taxes on their honorariums. (Isn’t an honorarium what PR companies pay to guest speakers at events who aren’t permitted, because of professional affiliations, to receive payments?) Because there is no politics in the Olympics, let’s call it “gamesmanship.” To paraphrase a famous line from Casablanca: Politics in the Olympics, shocking, shocking.
- I’d wager the value of gold in an Olympic medal that less people knew that the first three finishers were paid than the number of times that Rubio voted “no” in the Senate.
- The USOC is also obviously in denial about politics place in the Olympics by asking that the games should not be used as a political tool during the U.S, presidential campaign, saying it is against the Olympic Charter.
- Ambush marketing stories, emphasizing the heavy hands of the Olympic brand policemen, also received on-going coverage. The ludicrousness went so far as to cover up names of bathroom toilet paper dispensers.
- Prior to the start of the games, Olympic sponsorship stories were scant and mostly limited to marketing columns, not exactly a priority for most readers, but maybe for the advertising industry.
- But longtime Olympic sponsor McDonald’s was criticized for its eating healthy Olympic promotion and the story was covered by major media.
- The London Assembly, the government watchdog group, called for a sports sponsorship ban on fast-food and soft-drink companies.
- Stories about shoddy official Olympic merchandise received coverage.
- So did e-mail scams claiming to come from official Olympic sources.
- There’s an advantage in watching the events on tape delay. I was able to view a baseball game and in between innings switched to the Olympics to learn when the sports that interested me would be televised. Bonus: Doing so permitted me to miss many baseball and Olympic commercials.
- Let’s be honest: Unless you get caught up in the Olympic spirit by being there or having a commercial interest, many hours of viewing had little fascination to U.S. sports enthusiasts and had TV spectators not caring about which brand said what during a series of unending commercials, hype for NBC’s’ fall schedule, boiler plate-like statements from most athletes, (perhaps because of the less than incisive questions from the after event interviewers), and good-feel and sob stories (not just on NBC).
- Diving’s Cynthia Potter excepted, watching most prime time analyst’s inability to clearly critique athlete’s routines so non expert viewers will get insights made me appreciate the great analysis of Olympian Dick Buttons when dissecting ice skating performances.
Truth in advertising: I don’t recall an Olympics in which so many athletes said they were professionals and had an obligation to their sponsors.
- Nike proved how easy it was to identify with the Olympics without being an official sponsor with its brilliant international “Find Your Greatness” TV commercial. It shows athletes performing in London, not That London, but in London’s all over the world.
- Their athletic ability not withstanding, female beach volleyball loses some allure when the bikinis are missing.
- Better than gold? Only if you don’t have to spend it and get endorsements. The six grams of gold in the gold medal is worth about $300.00.
- Olympic profiling? Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen’s performance raised suspicious eyebrows about the possibility of her using performance enhancing drugs.
- Happiest fans? Must be the British. So many of their former colonies won medals that they can experience distant relative vicarious thrills.
There were also some head-scratching happenings.
- An athlete from Greece was banned from participating because she tweeted what was considered by some a politically incorrect sophomoric, but not malicious, joke.
- A female swimmer from Australia was criticized for tweeting a photo of herself in a bikini. Shocking. Maybe she should switch to beach volleyball.
- A sports writer was dethroned as a Jeopardy champion when he didn’t know the dimensions of the Olympic badminton court. Not the IOC, but Alex Trebek sent him home.
- Ecuador said there will be no decision on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden until after the Olympics.
There should be many Lessons Learned for marketers and PR people from the negative press (event coverage excepted) the London Olympics received.
Five important Lessons’s Learned:
- Just because an Olympics is awarded to a free country doesn’t lessen the negative media coverage; in fact it increases it.
- Another is that ambush marketing can not be prevented.
- A third is that the Olympics did not diminish media coverage of the U.S.’s favorite sports, baseball, basketball and football (or continuing news regarding the Penn State scandal), even though pro football's exhibition season just began and basketball’s hasn’t.
- A fourth lesson should be that marketers should take a closer look at the effectiveness of social media (did anyone say ROI?) before determining how much of their budget should be spent on it. Despite social media’s outrage about NBC’s Olympic coverage, the telecasts drew gold medal audiences.
- The fifth Lesson Learned is that until the IOC stops pandering to the Arab countries, there will be many more negative major media stories prior to after and during the games than sponsorship brand stories.
But the most important Lesson Learned that should be remembered is that when considering a multi-million mega sports buy-in, to thy own self be true.
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Arthur Solomon was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, handling national and international sports and non-sports programs, including the Olympic and Asian Games organizing committees and sponsors. He can be reached at [email protected] |
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Responses: |
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Wes Pedersen (8/15):
Arthur, while all this was going on in London, young Americans were dying with the scantest of mention in the "pacified" Afghanistan and, quite possibly, Iraq. There is a discrepancy here that screams of inequality and shows once again that, to the media, and large portions of the public, the Afghan war is becoming the war that never was.
Arthur, I trust that, in one form or another, this masterpiece will appear in that next book I keep urging you to write.
Joe Honick, GMA International Ltd (8/20):
And, oh, yes, Arthur, this was about the universality of sports, wasn't it? I'm sure I heard thst somewhere. And it took a gutsy little gymnast not only to use the Havs Negila but to dedicate her Gold winning perrormance to the only Olympians to be murdered. This was followed by the class act of the Italian team that likewise took a few moments quietly for the same purpose.
Some one of us should also have commented that the networks could have done worse than having Arthur in London for his usual astute observations that cut through the BS of temps hired by the networks. Good work.
Bill Huey, Strategic Communications (8/28):
Pretty thorough list, there, Arthur. I agree that ambush marketing cannot be prevented, but trying to prevent it is part and parcel of the IOC's obsession with $$$, or pounds, or Swiss francs, or whatever it is they're using.
Costas and Lauer make a nauseating pair, each hard enough to take on their own, deadly when together. And yes, sometimes I think we love the royals more than the Brits. Why is that? Because they're immensely rich, but not money-grubbing capitalists?
As usual, businesses in the host city got the finger. But it was a triumph for England. |
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