BEGINNING on Friday, the Chinese government will begin restricting advertising space in Beijing, giving preference to the official sponsors of the Olympic Games.
The restrictions are meant to clamp down on so-called ambush marketers, which are companies that are not official sponsors but hope to gain some halo effect from the Games. One advertiser that is likely to suffer the most is
Nike, which has broad marketing ambitions in China but no qualifying sponsorship deal.
Ambush marketing has long been a flashpoint at the Olympics. Sponsors pay upward of $65 million for the right to affiliate their brand with the Olympics, and they do not want their advertisements eclipsed by nonpaying competitors. The job of policing the marketing landscape is generally left to the host country, the
International Olympic Committee and national organizing committees.
The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, which is known as Bocog, has asked advertising agencies to avoid using Olympic symbols without authorization and is asking media companies to carry ads of Olympic sponsors on their channels featuring Olympic content.
From the perspective of the sponsors, this is a good thing indeed.
“We really rely on them to monitor and correct those problems,” said Petro Kacur, a spokesman for
Coca-Cola, an official sponsor. “It’s not a role that we play.”
source: nytimes.com
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