It’s the Biggest Cover-Up of the Games

The company that manufactured the toilets in use inside Pinerolo Palaghiaccio, the curling site for the 2006 Winter Olympics, is not an official Olympic sponsor, so anyone using the restrooms inside the arena has been seeing strips of gray tape placed strategically over porcelain.

The same tape has been plastered over sponsor patches on skiers’ jackets in Sestriere and the brand names on television monitors inside numerous venues, anywhere an unapproved corporate logo might appear.

When asked how many rolls of tape had been spread across these Games, Cecilia Gandini, an organizing committee executive, laughed and said, “I don’t know how many meters, but it means we’ve been working quite hard.”

While thousands of athletes have skied, skated and sledded at more than a dozen venues for the last two weeks, Gandini and her office for brand protection have been engaged in a different type of competition: scrutinizing every inch of snow and ice to be sure that only the right logos, in the right places, adorn these Games.

The reason is twofold:

* The International Olympic Committee reaps hundreds of millions in sponsorship dollars, in part, by promising corporations a certain exclusivity. Heaven forbid that an unofficial -- and unpaid for -- logo sneaks into view of fans or, worse, television cameras.

* At the same time, despite enormous revenues, IOC officials seek to avoid appearing too commercialized.

“This is a hyper-sensitive issue,” said Scott Becher, a Florida sports marketer who has worked extensively with Olympic organizations. “They’re going to do whatever they can to protect their investment.”

Eleven major corporations, ranging from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola to Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo and Canadian insurer Manulife, are paying about $80 million each to be top-tier Olympic sponsors from 2005 through 2008.

Category exclusivity is a big part of what allows the IOC to command such lofty sums.

When Panasonic executives sign a deal for their product to be the official television of the Olympics, they know that no other manufacturer can make that claim. At these Games, wherever there is a Sony monitor -- in pressrooms and inside venues -- tape covers the name.

And because Samsung makes the official Olympic cellphone, no other brand is recognized.

“If a marketer can’t brag that they have an Olympic association that none of their competitors can share, then it isn’t worth the multimillion-dollar investment,” said Becher, president of the Sports & Sponsorships marketing agency.

The value of the Olympics as an advertising platform also makes the Games a favorite target for “ambush marketing,” a Wild West-type of business that can take several forms.

When television cameras show a snowboarder standing at the top of the halfpipe, preparing for his run, dialing a tune on his iPod, Apple Computer Inc. -- not an official sponsor -- could not buy better publicity.

“A totally organic moment,” said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. “It’s an athlete choosing a product they love and it becomes a thing that everybody remembers.”

Other forms of ambush are less happenstance.

At the 1992 Barcelona Games, there was a flap when the U.S. Olympic Committee mandated that athletes wear Reebok warmups on the podium. Several basketball players on the U.S. “Dream Team” who were Nike endorsers reluctantly agreed to wear the warmups but peeled them back to hide the logo.

Four years later, among the defining images of the 1996 Atlanta Games was Michael Johnson running in shimmering gold shoes -- Nike’s flashy way of turning the 200-meter dash into a 20-second commercial spot.

“It’s a backhanded compliment,” said Timo Lumme, the IOC’s director of television and marketing. “It’s a compliment in the sense that companies consider the Olympics such an important event.”

Ambush marketers have been everywhere in Turin. One non-sponsor had billboards along the highway that led to mountain venues. In a less-elaborate incident, a man in the stands at figure skating held up a banner with the name of an online casino until workers made him put it away.

Target found another way to get noticed, plastering its logo on the city’s trains and having workers walk up and down the aisles handing out bells and noisemakers.

“As far as I’m aware, Target has no business in Europe, no stores here,” Lumme said. “It’s an amusing irritant.”

The IOC has taken a tougher stand on the mountain slopes, ice rinks and bobsled tracks where athletes compete.

It might seem hypocritical for an organization that receives so much sponsorship money to talk about purity, but marketing executives say the Olympics remain the most advertising-free environment in the world of major sports.

Sponsors pay for an official connection to the Games and the right to stamp the famous five rings on their advertising but do not get the on-site signage so prevalent in, say, NASCAR or the NFL.

“The Olympics are a multimillion-dollar enterprise,” Swangard said. “I think they’re just trying to protect the brand image the movement was built on.”

Product placement is limited and discrete. The athletes’ uniforms, for instance, may bear only a small manufacturer’s logo.

Lumme explained: “You are, on one hand, protecting the Olympic brand and, on the other hand, protecting the legitimate sponsors.”

That’s where Gandini and her brand patrol come in.

They took their marching orders from the Olympic charter, Rule 53, regarding “Advertising, Demonstrations, Propaganda.” Allowable logos are defined specifically, down to the centimeter.

Anything more must be -- and has been -- covered.

Olympic workers, instructed on the rule before the Games, have scoured every site, watching the grandstands, checking uniforms before athletes compete. At news conferences, bottles of water are placed on the dais -- an official brand made by Coca-Cola -- and athletes are asked to keep any drinks they might have brought with them out of view of cameras.

After winning a bronze medal in the women’s 1,000-meter race, speedskater Anni Friesinger of Germany complained about having to hold a plain blue sports bottle in her lap.

“It doesn’t even have any words on it,” she said.

An army of volunteers helping to run the venues has done much of this ardent policing.

Gandini conceded: “It might be that sometimes they are overreacting to the general principles.”

Consider an incident at Palavela arena, site of the figure skating, where a worker politely insisted that reporters tape over the logos on their laptop computers in a media workroom.

“My personal thinking is, it’s better to do more than requested than to do less,” Gandini said.

Thus the copious rolls of tape.

Gandini would like to think that these have been the cleanest Olympics ever and Lumme said that the IOC had been encouraged by the Italians’ “zeal” in protecting the Games and their sponsors.

Ever the marketer, Becher wondered if the closing of many advertising doors might have opened another.

“There might be an opportunity,” he said, “for someone to be the official duct tape of the Olympics.”