Sponsorship expert’s warning to marketers: act now for 2012
Marketers should be considering sponsorship deals with the London 2012 Olympic games now, according to a leading sponsorship expert.
In an exclusive interview with Marketing Week, Octagon Games Marketing managing director Bob Heussner (pictured) predicts that the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) will be selling sponsorship deals by the third quarter of next year.
“London 2012 is really just around the corner from a marketing point of view,” he says. “So if brands want to take full advantage of the rights and benefits an association with the games can offer they need to start working on it now.”
Heussner expects that Locog will offer three tiers of sponsorship including: six to ten partners, each paying about &£50m; ten to 12 sponsors, each paying about &£20m and 20 to 30 official suppliers, each paying about &£10m.
Individual deals vary but he predicts they will all revolve around the rights to use words such as Olympics, Olympiad and Olympian, the Olympic Rings logo, the Great Britain team logo, and the official London 2012 emblem (once it has been designed).
However, Heussner also points out that unlike other sporting events, Olympic stadia are “clean venues”, in that they do not display corporate logos – so it is crucial marketers know how to exploit the deals.
Quoting Coca-Cola former chief marketer Peter Sealey, Heussner adds: “The bad news about Olympic deals is that they’re expensive, the good news is that they are more powerful than any other form of sponsorship in the world.”
