When it comes to cashing in on brand, the IOC is no amateur
RIO DE JANEIRO— Coca-Cola has the Olympics franchise. But at least one coke dealer has muscled in on the Olympic rings action.
And police have muscled him off to the hoosegow.
When local cops raided a house in the city’s suburbs last week, they found a stash of bullets and packets of cocaine stamped with the rings logo. Hard to say which was the more severe crime: peddling drugs or ambush branding of the Games’ uber-patented iconography.
Brazilian drug dealers apparently have a history of wrapping their product with images of sports stars, primarily soccer players, as a street version of marketing in an ultracompetitive industry. But the traffickers are viewed no more dimly for breach of copyright infractions than any other unapproved exploiter of the Games commercial domain.
Knock-offs of kitsch and caboodle are prevalent around Rio and a damn sight cheaper than the wares for sale at the official Olympics megastore on Copacabana Beach. Logo hijacking extends to towels, key chains, ashtrays, T-shirts, posters, scarves, socks, hats and condoms.
Even before the Olympics got to town, counterfeit usurping of designer labels and pirated merchandise accounted for a $30-billion enterprise, according to industry analysts. But the Games have provided a humongous boon for the bootleggers and fly-by-nights.
And why not, really? Does the International Olympic Committee deserve such a monopoly on the billions that will be spent for endorsement privileges? This is not the most honourable group of profiteers on Earth, after all.
All those fine words wrapped around the ideal of the Games amount to profiteering on a grandiose scale. Greedy buggers, the IOC, whether demanding upward of $200 million from the Gang of 11 — top-tier “World Wide” sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Visa, McDonald’s, Omega and General Electric — and the trickle-down advertising-anointed corporations with national deals — RBC, Bell, Hudson’s Bay and Canadian Tire. The IOC brand may have taken a colossal hit with the recent doping revelations report that depleted Team Russia. Yet the marketing monoliths seem not to have been scared away from associating with the Games.
Chris Overbolt, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee, was asked the other day if the scandal had caused sponsors to shy away from the whole extravaganza. “I can only tell you that support for our athletes in recent years, including certainly this year, has never been better. Our business has never been strong commercially. We’re seeing engagement with sports and with athletes directly at the highest levels.”
If cynical observers were waiting for a watershed moment, with sponsors deciding the Games aren’t worth the exceedingly high cost and the attendant notoriety, this isn’t it.
Few athletes can command generous private sponsorship arrangements. Usain Bolt, sponsored by Puma, rakes in $32.5 million a year, according to Forbes, including $30 million directly from endorsement. A majority of Olympians, however, struggle by on government financing or modest sponsorships in the $10,000 to $25,000 range.
Anointed sponsors go to extraordinary lengths to protect their exclusivity. Nike, one of the World Wide bunch, will not have athletes provide “free” publicity to sports shoe rivals, for instance, compelling participants to hide a competitor’s logo by taping sleeves around footwear and the like. Athletic footwear is, after all, a $75-billion global industry. Canadian high-jumper Derek Drouin is among those who’ve received permission from Nike to wear shoes manufactured by another company but the logo must remain under wraps. The swoosh rules. Even Brazilian soccer legend Pele, invited by the Rio Organizing Committee to light the Olympic cauldron at Friday’s opening ceremonies, in the stadium where he scored his 1,000th goal in 1969, is still waiting for permission to be granted by his personal athletic sponsor, a U.S. company that holds the rights to his brand name.
The IOC — which formally proclaims itself a non-profit institution, ha ha — has always been aggressive about protecting its trademark, in the same way the Super Bowl compels hands off of its brand. The Lords of the Rings insist they’ve actually loosened up restrictions since passing — amending — Rule 40 last year, which reads: “No competitor, coach, trainer or official who participates in the Games may allow his person, name, picture or sports performance to be used for advertising purposes during the Olympic Games” without express consent of the IOC board.
Can’t use terms like Olympics, Summer Games, Rio 2016, even generic words like “gold” or “Rio” during a blackout period that extends from July 22 to Aug. 24.
Athletes certainly can’t thank their own sponsors. “Our freedom to be a part of these sponsorships up until the Games has changed,” notes Canadian swimmer Ryan Cochrane. “It needs to keep going in that direction, but it has gotten better than it was four years ago.
“Sports is how we make money. This is an important part our success as athletes. We get government funding, but to actually make money, make a career out of the sport, you need that (sponsorship) support. You want to feel like a professional athlete and these sponsors help us do that.” UFC star Ronda Rousey won judo bronze in Beijing but was famously living out of her car a few months later. Her hardship as an Olympian was not a unique story.
The purported relaxing of restrictions in Rio allows non-official sponsors, for the first time, to run ad campaigns during the Games featuring their own Olympic athletes, as long as those no-no terms are avoided and there’s no over-link between a product and the Games.
This has made for some strategic dancing around the guidelines. Under Armour, for example, has been running TV ads since March that showcase the rigorous training of Michael Phelps, its major advertising “get.” He’s shown in the pool. But the no-no words are never heard nor the Olympic symbols depicted — although viewers will certainly make the connection. That’s the whole point.
What it gives grudgingly with one hand, the IOC strains to yank back with another. In Rio, it’s going ridiculously heavy against social media, basically extending its trademark to #Olympics. So, athletes, don’t go tweeting your Games gratitude to sponsors, or vice-versa. Though how the IOC expects to police what’s communicated through 5 billion cellphones around the planet is a mystery.
Of course, if any outfit can figure out a way to drop the hammer on non-complying tweeters and up-your-nose trolls, it’s the IOC. It’s a gold-medal bully. Don’t you dare put rings on it. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
Ozymandias in Rio. In Copenhagen in 2009, when Brazil’s successful bid for this year’s Olympics was announced, Lula, then the country’s president, leapt in the air and danced. So did most Brazilians back home. He said, extraordinarily, “I confess to you if I die right now my life would have been worth it.”
What a testimony. His life had been spectacular: an uneducated labourer from an impoverished, broken family. He rose through the union movement, ran for president three times and got smacked down by Brazil’s elites, then won and had a highly successful presidency. He raised 30 to 35 million people from poverty. Yet the ultimate achievement was — an Olympics. What does it show? That people yearn to be more than their class or economic origins: the appeal of nationalism is enduring, comparable only to the appeal of religion — and just as multifarious in its potential effects, for good and ill.
Now the day has come and Lula won’t be there. Nor will his comrade and successor, Dilma Rousseff. She’s been removed and is being impeached. He’s the first president who has been criminally indicted. Most attacks on them are sleazy and opportunistic, but the country is in such disarray that no one, including the stand-in president — also indicted — wants to attend.
So, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. At least Ozymandias had been gone for eons when his words turned ironic. Lula is still in the vicinity. The Zika connection. In Brazillionaires, his recent, excellent book on the superrich in Brazil (and much else), journalist Alex Cuadras says, “Zika was not a curse from above. For decades, Brazil suffered from outbreaks of dengue, which is carried by the same mosquito . . . (It) thrives on urban neglect.” It was a question of priorities. He makes the same point about the death of a cyclist run down by the son of an iconic Brazillionaire, Eike Batista. Others had died on the same neglected stretch of road. (Eike, by the way, is so Trumpian it hurts — including the mane. Cuadras may have solved the mystery of that “hair.”)
What priorities were involved? In choosing poverty alleviation, Lula and Dilma chose not to confront Brazil’s deep corruption and inequality; in fact they joined in those and utilized them to help pass their programs. Challenging those blemishes would’ve been hard and perhaps fatal to their agenda.
It’s like Lesser Evil Voting (LEV); this is Lesser Evil Economic Policy (LEEP!). But, when things shifted — oil and coffee prices collapsed, the global economy slowed — there hadn’t been basic structural changes put in place. The basic poverty measures stayed, but other elements, like community policing in the favelas, got cut and the drug gangs began returning.
The elites had retained all their power so they continued to benefit from Olympic spending but the underclasses felt betrayed and excluded. Then the elites — loyalty not being their identifying traits — turned on their previous leftist allies.
To be clear, I’m in favour of bread and circuses. I think both are essential, not just to well-being, but to human survival. But if the changes you make are only half-assed, they leave you vulnerable to counterattack by those who’ve always been at the top. I know no clear answer about what to do in such a situation; the answer is: you muddle through. In the 20th century, numerous isms and their makers thought they had solutions to how to “fix” society. You just imbibed and applied. Now those are as gone as Ozymandias and his delusions. The End Games? It’s appealing to think technology will resolve intractable human dilemmas, and it sometimes does: not always pleasantly but — resolutely. This may be the case with doping. Sometime soon, “genetic enhancement” may adjust for any testing and compensate. An “ethicist” told the Financial Times that in 50 years, natural athletes could seem “anachronistic.” It sounds like Formula 1 racing: superb machines with humans inside. What then — Formula 1 Olympics?
Sports wouldn’t disappear, but high performance sports as we know it, with its rewards and stakes, would. It’s like intellectual property. For 400 years, copyright and patents seemed selfevident. Then the Internet made them start looking “anachronistic.” That doesn’t mean private property will disappear, or capitalism. But high-performance capitalism, as described, say, by Alex Cuadras, might start looking temporary — as Lula and Dilma both once dreamed.