On Advertising: Failure succeeds for London 2012 logo

LONDON: Has any marketer ever gotten more for its money than the London Olympics organizers when they introduced a new logo for the 2012 Games?

All right, some of the descriptions in the British tabloids - a "toileting monkey," a

ee advertising is not all that the organizers got for the new logo, a cartoon-like depiction of the number "2012." The design also prompted strong reactions from the
public, a measure of its ability to "engage" it, to use a bit of trendy marketing-speak.


Like other marketers that have tried to get consumers involved, the Olympic
organizers created a design template on their Web site for people to download and create their own logos; these have been posted on the site.

But the London 2012 Committee's user-generated-content plans got an unexpected lift when several newspapers embraced the idea, too, asking readers to send in their own Olympic logos, which they printed.

An anti-logo group drew 35,000 signatures to a petition seeking to have the design changed - that's 35,000 people who probably never thought they would feel passionately about an Olympic emblem.

Marketing experts said the outcry might be exactly what the organizers needed as they sought to raise interest among Britons, especially the young, who seem somewhat blasé about the London Games, at least compared with the Chinese and their excitement over the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

"From my perspective it was probably good for them because it got people talking about London and the Games," said Paul Kemp-Robertson, the editor of Contagious magazine, which tracks marketing trends in new media.

The London organizers need to generate awareness because they have set a goal of raising about one-third of the £2 billion-plus operating budget from sponsorships.
In attracting sponsorship money, the Olympics organizers have to compete against other sporting events with an international profile, including Formula One auto racing, the World Cup soccer tournament and the America's Cup.

So far, the London organizers have announced one major local sponsor, the British banking company Lloyds TSB, a deal worth a reported £80 million.
Joanna Manning-Cooper, a spokeswoman for the London committee, declined to comment on reports that EDF Energy, the British unit of the French utility Électricité de France, was poised to announce a similar deal.

For that kind of money, any marketer would want a bit of flexibility, and Manning-Cooper said the London 2012 logo is the first Olympics emblem that can be modified by marketers. In newspaper ads that appeared last week, Lloyd's TSB used a giant image of the logo, but in its own brand colors - blue fading to green - rather than one of the four colors provided by the Games organizers.

Manning-Cooper declined to comment on talk that organizers would eventually allow sponsors to rearrange the individual shapes that make up the design, but said the logo would "evolve over time."

With five years left till the 2012 Games, there's plenty of time for the fuss over the logo to die down - or for it, too, to evolve.