Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [115]
* It turns out that YouTube wanted help helping advertisers make the most of their channel. Toy produced a “Tubetorial” for ad folks on its brand channel that’s, in essence, a really smart YouTube video.
Torched If They Do, Torched If They Don’t
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
—Naomi Klein
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
—George Orwell
The Passing of the Placebo
The chief marketing officers at Worldwide Olympic Partners companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Kodak could not have been pleased. On April 9, 2008, four months before the Beijing Games, on a beautiful San Francisco blue sky morning, the Olympic torch run that they were sponsoring (as part of overall commitments in the hundreds of millions of dollars) was not going well.
Actually it wasn’t going at all.
There were an estimated ten thousand people lined up outside of AT&T Park and along the planned route, some of whom wanted to simply glimpse the legendary torch, but most of whom wanted to either protest or support the policies of the Chinese government. After a short delay, a torch-bearing runner briefly emerged from the ballpark, but instead of proceeding along the Embarcadero, he slipped into a nearby warehouse on Pier 40. Turns out that his torch was a placebo. This is because after watching the surging, poster-waving crowds and sensing that the civic event once associated with global unity and peace was about to turn ugly, if not violent, San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, decided to make a change. He ended that leg of the run before it really began, and the torch (actually two different backup torches) finally emerged some two miles away on spectator-free Van Ness Avenue.
Newsom’s strategy, and, I imagine, that of the mega-sponsors and the leaders of the most populous nation on the planet, had seemingly become: the fewer people who see the torch, the better. Which was a far cry from the good old days, when the torch run generated oodles of feel-good brand equity (in the case of Budweiser, fodder for a goose-bumps-inducing, award-winning torch run reen-actment commercial) and an odd kind of global pride, and the Games themselves were a premier and risk-free advertising opportunity.
When I had the opportunity to work on ads for AT&T’s sponsorship of the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, I was thrilled. What’s better than doing big-budget, 800-number-free commercials that will be seen by a global audience, not to mention every head-hunter and creative director in the business?
But this time things were different.
Going into the 2008 Games, sponsoring advertisers had to know about China’s oppressive pollution, deplorable human rights record, and smothering censorship of news, information, and ideas. Of course, the Olympics and its corporate sponsors weren’t responsible for these crimes, but they were surely on the corporate and cultural radar. But still, one imagines markets rationalizing what an opportunity an Olympiad in Beijing represented for a brand: a showcase before the century’s leading economic power on a global stage that celebrates friendship and peace through sport. Plus, they must have figured, if China’s credentials were good enough for the International Olympic Committee, not to mention the executives at NBC Sports, they must be good enough for (insert mega-corp here).
Or not.
The protests that began in London and Paris before moving on to San Francisco were only the beginning. There were subsequent incidents in Indonesia, Australia, and Argentina. In Japan, local sponsors backed out of the torch run, citing phrases like “brand risk” and “brand damage.” Before the torch reached Chinese soil in Hong Kong, three would-be Danish protesters were put on a plane out of the country, and officials braced themselves for the arrival of that radical threat