Sport’s leadership crisis?
One of the points made by ex Coke man James Williams, in his excellent interview for Unofficial Partner Episode #301 was to argue that the IOC should be more pro-active in setting a progressive framework to enforce improvements in Olympic sustainability in Games delivery. We’ve always recognised huge value in host cities using their bids […]
‘The biggest mistake was to call it sponsorship’
Michael Payne has been at the forefront of the sports marketing industry for over thirty years – having lead the global marketing effort for the Olympic Movement for more than two decades as the IOC’s first Marketing and Broadcast Rights Director, generating more than US$15 billion in broadcast and marketing revenues. On leaving the IOC, […]
The challenges facing Partners of Tokyo 2020
Organising Committees famously misrepresent the value of Olympic Partnership. ‘The country needs you to step up.’ ‘It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.’ ‘The Prime Minister needs your help on this one.’ And the favourite: ‘It will be so good for your business.’ In London, LOCOG employed McKinsey to develop an elegantly simple model to […]
Alfred Kelly’s big decision
McDonald’s exit from sponsorship at the TOP echelon of Olympic partnership created a media opening for anti-IOC narrative. But the sponsorship issue that McDonald’s exit raises is not about the travails of the IOC, it’s about whether or not the sponsorship of both the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games can be justified – […]
If a leaf falls in the forest … will the IOC hear it?
If you work in the sponsorship industry for any length of time you will know that there are three hardy perennial media questions. These are: Francisco Goya has won the World Championship: what does that do to his sponsorship value? Francisco Goya has been accused of adultery on an unprecedented scale: what does this do […]
The Olympic Baby
We were a little surprised when we saw the IOC was planning on reforming its Rule 40. Rule 40 currently imposes commercial purdah on Olympians for nearly a month around the Games, preventing any use of name or likeness in association with non-Games partners. Penalties for contravention include disqualification and stripping of medals (although the reality […]
Timo Lumme from Working the Olympics
The following interview was first published in Working the Olympics. It gives an excellent overview of the value of the IOC for major corporates and offers, typically of Timo, a very insightful and pragmatic assessment of the challenges of Olympic marketing. Timo is the Managing Director of IOC Television & Marketing Services – the broadcast-rights marketing […]
LOCOG’s sponsorship mistake
The Greenwash Gold campaign, which seized on Dow Jones and lumped together BP and Rio Tinto to create a rogue’s gallery of London 2012, signally failed to attract consumer support. While LOCOG played the British card of staunch support extremely well, and the campaign has left barely a reputational scuff, one element though, Redmandarin would […]
Spinning the TOPs
The IOC’s TOP programme is clearly in rude good health. With seven out of 11 partners confirmed until 2020, the IOC can congratulate itself on having established itself clearly as the premier global property. The presence of businesses such as GE, P&G and Dow Chemical in the TOP programme further testifies to a value which […]
The Olympic story
Brand storytelling is back – bigger than ever. First time around for me was business author, Tom Peters. His original pitch was about corporate myth-making: the conscious creation of those symbolic stories which so effortlessly epitomise an attitude or a principle: Lou Gerstner forcing the IBM Board to abandon the powerpoint in favour of the […]
Sponsorship as organisational change driver
For Redmandarin, a full 90% of client briefs relate to deepening brand engagement. This might be expressed as repositioning, shift of audience focus, reappraisal, building NPS or advocacy, but, ultimately, it comes down to people feeling warmer about the brand But there’s another objective which surfaces much more rarely – organisational change. And sponsorship’s potential […]
8 insights into Olympic partnership
We’ve spent the last two years researching a book on Olympic partnership and how to ensure it can be transformational. The research draws on direct experience with six Olympic clients, desk research (a very smart desk) and extended interviews with the programme directors of 30 Olympic partners. Here are eight insights. 1 No logo is a […]
Sponsorship zen
It tickles us at Redmandarin that the IOC now has 11 TOP partners. Brands and rights-holders often perpetuate a false correlation between sponsor numbers and clutter, and talk about sponsor clutter as though it’s an issue – and yet the IOC’s elegant solution is simply zen: de-clutter. Certainly, there is a limit to the number […]
Own goal?
I think historians will look back and pinpoint Sydney 2000 as the event which truly marked the beginning of sport as a dominant global belief system. I’m not talking about global appeal or commercial value, I’m talking about sport as a predominant metaphor for living. Not disregarding the scepticism that preceded the Games, what was […]
The fuzzy space of Olympic ambush marketing
Where is the boundary between communal and rightsholder IP? This interview was first published in ‘Working the Olympics’. This interview tracks Jim’s experience of Scotia Bank sponsorship through Vancouver 2010. Ambush marketing was not his intention : rather, to explore the boundaries of rightsholder and communal IP. Jim Tobin, now retired, was Director and Head […]