Posts tagged London 2012

The other day I came across a puff piece written by a freelancer for Fast Company magazine which sought to suggest that Wolf Olins had known all along how well their logo would play at these Olympic Games and how their cunning plan had been amply vindicated by the emphatic success of London 2012 in the flesh.

The so-called back story to the strategy of the Games branding programme is a priceless piece of ex post facto rationalisation which plays fast and loose with the facts and does neither writer not the magazine a great deal of credit.

The lead in to these Games has been marked by the traditional disputes about expenditure and organisation, but on one thing at least, the nation was united: the logo was an ugly thing. Tabloids raged and the great British public fumed about how much better their offspring could have done than the prized organisation of Wolff Olins & Co.

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Here is a video the IOC should be embarrassed about, featuring its social media guru explaining why London 2012 must have so many rules governing the use of these technologies by participants and the public … because the Olympics are in truth an outdated media property in a world of 24/7 peer-to-peer connectivity. [ PaidContent ]. So far, the Games have been such a divisive and antisocial presence, in the shape of their marketing enforcers Locog, that one has to ask whether it is not time for the IOC to find new ways of monetising their circus in the future (besides the antiquated Olympic Partner Programme) because policing the interests of its corporate sponsors is proving nothing if not toxic and divisive. And the pressures can only increase as media and platforms proliferate. The latest Locog victim, the Box Hill News, a Surrey newsletter. It’s about time for “smarter” to be added to the Olympic ideals of “faster, higher and stronger” … Oh. And “cheaper”.

* It’s like a dystopian future in which Britain is run by a military junta headed by Ronald McDonald” - Andrew Rawnsley

* How will you watch the Games? TV is still the daddy of the Olympic media [ PaidContent ]

This summer’s Olympics might not be the first digital Games, but they will be available to more people via more media platforms than ever before. Indeed, they reckon the digital legacy for the planet will amount to no less than 6 gigabytes of data per second. I never got to write the story I began researching when I first started this blog. Who has the time? And do I really want to depress myself finding out just how much taxpayer money the BBC will be burning on this bonfire of national chauvninism? Still, the Google contract publishing team had a crack at it. It’s painfully uncritical of the ideas or the investment, but the information is still interesting. [ ThinkWithGoogle ]