British businesses are no doubt excited that the Olympics are coming to their fair land. Even if they're not official sponsors of the London 2012 Summer Games, it's reasonable to exect that the influx of tourists would boost the local economy, not only frequenting businesses but wanting to take home a few pieces of England to share with those who weren’t lucky enough to join them in viewing the world’s premier athletes in competition.

But some of that glee has turned to heartache in the days leading up to the Games. The International Olympic Committee and the London Organizing Committee (LOCOG) have been coming down hard on any business that comes anywhere close to aligning themselves with the Games if they haven’t shelled out the mega-millions it takes to be an official partner of the event. You may recall the story of the "Lympic" cafe, so-renamed after being asked by officials to drop its O. Now comes the case of the tissue-paper Olympic rings.

“A florist has been ordered to take down a tissue paper Olympic rings display from her shop window because it breaches trademark rules,” according to The Daily Mail. The small flower shop in question, La Rose Florists in Stoke-on-Trent, were apparently told they may be sued by such megacorporations as Coca-Cola for their creativity.Continue reading...

The coming Summer Olympics are promising to be the most digital sporting event of all time. NBC is planning to stream gobs of events and is not afraid that doing so will bastardize the prime-time coverage that the average viewer seeks. That way, a table-tennis aficionado can catch every last move that the Warren Buffett-sponsored American teen prodigy Ariel Hsing makes while the general public can just marvel at her greatest hits.

The digital Olympics onslaught got a serious boost this week when Olympic partner Samsung released an awesome online-only advertisement featuring David Beckham, one of the brand's Team Samsung London 2012 ambassadors. In it, the soccer star promotes the Galaxy Note by sounding out Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” by kicking balls at a wall of drums. The word was spread about the ad using Beckham’s own Facebook page as well as other online touch points. Since the video went live on Monday, it's racked up more than 1M views.Continue reading...

For this summer’s Olympics in London, Adidas is listed as a partner. Four years from now, though, its biggest rival may be holding that title.

ESPN reports that Nike is exploring the idea of becoming an official sponsor of the Games by 2016, when the world’s best heptathletes and canoers, among others, will head to Rio de Janeiro. 

Nike already has a slew of agreements in place with different Olympic and sports-federation governing bodies around the globe. In the U.S., for example, Nike sponsors the both the national basketball and the track and field teams, and has deals in place to put its golf ball-inspired track and field apparel (at right) on athletes from Germany, China and Russia too.

"We look at the Summer Games as one of the biggest opportunities we have to introduce new products and technologies," said Charlie Denson, president of the Nike brand, to ESPN. "We've always focused on the athlete. The misperception might be that we don't spend time with the federations or the organizing committees or things like that.”

The Olympics always provide a battleground for sports-apparel brands since the companies also sponsor so many athletes who are at the Games. It can likely get confusing for even the athletes themselves as to when they can wear the gear of their sponsor and when they need to wear the gear provided by the team.Continue reading...

The way the world communicates with one another is ever-evolving as new technologies continue to appear and social media continues to introduce new avenues of expression. With that, brands are always finding new ways to touch their customers and all of the classic branding rules are being tossed out the window.

Olympic sponsorship has long been a way for major brands to reach consumers every few years, but international Olympic executives are looking to possibly shift how the model works in order to embrace this new world.

The sponsorship model now in place brings in $1 billion, according to the Financial Times, but the IOC is planning to “take a step back” and re-assess the sponsorship strategy going forward.Continue reading...

The last Summer Olympics were in 2008. That’s seven katrillion years in technology years. Much has changed since then and marketers are planning to put extra emphasis on an area that has grown exponentially in the last four human years: social media.

Brand marketers are particularly interested in using Facebook to boost their brands this summer. After all, you fish where the fish are — and Facebook had 794 million people visiting it each month of last year, spending an average (per comScore) of six hours per visit.Continue reading...

At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the India Olympic Committee sent 56 athletes to compete and came home with its best performance in history: one gold (men’s 10m air rifle shooting) and two bronze (wrestling and boxing).

It remains unclear if any Indian athletes will be showing up at the London 2012 Summer Games due to the massive presence of Olympic sponsor Dow Chemicals, which is “sponsoring a $11.4-million decorative wrap that will be installed around London's Olympic Stadium,” according to the Associated Press.

The problem stems from Dow’s ownership of Union Carbide, which it bought in 2000, 16 years after Union’s plant in Bhopal had a gas leak that “killed an estimated 15,000 people and injured half a million,” the AP notes. While Dow didn’t own Union when the incident happened, critics say the company is “responsible for lingering groundwater contamination and other issues,” the AP notes.Continue reading...

Major sporting events and major brands go hand in hand, and marketers can't get started early enough with pre-event promotions. 

Witness the recent Super Bowl. An unprecedented number of Super Bowl ads appeared prior to the Super Bowl, as online unveilings appeared via YouTube and on promotional websites. Some pundits questioned the wisdom of such pre-game publicity, wondering if it simply undermined advertising effectiveness.

But that isn't stopping big brands from doing it again, this time in advance of the 2012 Summer Olympics to be held in London. Coca-Cola, a major Super Bowl advertiser, has gone public with its "Move to the Beat" London 2012 Olympics campaign that was announced in September.Continue reading...

While the best of the world’s amateur archers, hammer throwers, and synchronized divers (among plenty of others) are getting ready for this summer’s Olympic Games in London, others are busy working toward future Olympic dreams.

Sochi, Russia, is readying itself for the Winter Games in 2014, while the organizers in Rio are likely paying pretty close attention to the London 2012 organizers' Dow Chemical sponsorship uproar as it figures out how it will handle things four years down the line when it hosts the 2016 Summer Games. And for those of you keeping score at home, there are now only 2,200 days to go before the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

As for where the globe’s athletic elite will be headed in 2020, a decision won’t be made till September of 2013, but six cities have submitted bids to the International Olympic Committee: Tokyo; Rome; Istanbul; Madrid; Doha, Qatar; and Baku, Azerbaijan. The good folks of Madrid, though, have already experienced a sight misstep.Continue reading...