There is a myth in marketing today that many people blindly believe about sponsoring events … that you always need exclusivity. The benefits of being an exclusive sponsor are easy to list, but there are some less considered negative aspects that could end up doing more harm to your brand than good. Let’s look at the stories of a worldwide Olympic sponsor for whom the strategy of being an exclusive sponsor may not be such a good idea … Visa.

Just about every Olympic traveller here in Beijing has a story to tell about one really annoying moment when they were trying to pay for something and learned that at all Olympic venues the only card they could use was a Visa and no other type of credit card. The fact is, people already have decided on their credit cards before arriving at the Olympics. Hardly any first time Olympic visitor is going to know that Visa is the only card accepted at the Games, and arriving here to learn this fact can make life very difficult and expensive. In addition, business travellers are often locked into a particular kind of credit card to use for work and finding that they cannot use it is a very big inconvenience that is blamed on Visa. The end result is lots of negative experiences and consumer anger against Visa, including several people I spoke to who even said they would NOT get a new Visa card because of this tactic. The incremental sales and revenue for Visa cards at the Games may be good, but the word of mouth generated for Visa at the world’s largest sporting event is nearly all negative.

Another example of the down side of exclusivity from the Olympics is what I remember from Foster’s sponsorship of the Games in Sydney. If you are among the many people in America who think Fosters is actually an Australian beer, let me burst your bubble. It is an American beer and before the Olympics in Sydney, you could not find it anywhere in Australia. During the Sydney Games, lots of Americans travelled to Sydney, which Fosters knew, so they purchased a large sponsorship where they were one of two kinds of beer served at events. I went to one beach volleyball event and vividly remember one side of the beer stand with the Aussie beer sold out, and the Fosters side with lots of stock untouched. It was an embarassing moment for Fosters. Added to that was all the Australians who talked about how Fosters was not, in fact, Australian.

There are likely many other examples of brands that should think a bit harder about whether an exclusive sponsorship actually makes the most sense for them. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes exclusive sponsorships can work very well, if the strategy aligns with the experience offered and way that the brand is integrated into the event. Adidas’ sponsorship of the Olympics works because they supply all the uniforms and custom made gear. Omega’s sponsorship works because they are the official timepiece at an event were time really matters. Not surprisingly, I think Lenovo’s sponsorship of the Games works for a similar reason. Ultimately, there are some brands who can realize the benefit of exclusivity and some that cannot. The trick is understanding where your brand fits before you drop a big chunk of your marketing budget into an exclusive sponsorship that won’t deliver the way you expect.

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Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn’t surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you’re not in Beijing, you’ll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making …

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

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I just landed in Beijing and will be spending the next two weeks here as part of the promotional efforts for what I have previously called my dream project, helping Lenovo to promote its Voices of the Summer Games site that features 100 Olympic athletes blogging their journies to Beijing and experiences at the Olympics. Armed with my Nikon and a brand new super light Lenovo U110 Red Ideapad (PRODUCT PLUG/DISCLAIMER – I already love this machine, but it’s standard issue for Lenovo team members during the Olympics and I will be returning it after the Games).

As myself and my colleague Kaitlyn (aka – CatchupLady) get ready to create a flood of content from the Games, we had an idea for how this could also be the chance to conduct a little social experiment by offering some custom and exclusive Olympic content to ANY blogger who would like to take part. Think of us as your resident bloggers on the ground at the Olympics. We want to build out a core group of at least 25 bloggers who are interested in grabbing content that we will create (either blog posts or photos) and feature it on your own blog (either with or without your own commentary added). There are only two conditions to be part of this group:

1. You must include the standard line that will be at the bottom of each of our posts about how this is part of the Lenovo Voices Of The Summer Games Campaign and include the link back to http://summergames.lenovo.com.
2. You must provide separate attribution and link back to the original source of the content (either our Flickr gallery or one of our blogs – Rohit’s or Kaitlyn’s)

If you are willing to do both those things, leave a comment here or on Kaitlyn’s blog or send me a personal email at rohitaustralia [at] gmail [dot] com to be added to the list. In return, you will not only have our full permission to repurpose and use any of this content, but you will also be added to a list of people that we will be emailing first with links to exclusive content, new blog posts and anything else we manage to create. The main topics of this content will be stories about Olympic marketing and PR, real stories of athletes, discussions with Olympic athletes, sponsors, fans, training personnel or family members, and anything else we can think of. I will be doing this full time over the next two weeks, as opposed to my usual struggle to blog while still doing my day job. For the next two weeks, blogging will be my day job (and in case you are wondering, yes, that was as satisfying to write as it sounded).

Both Kaitlyn and I will also be seeking our your suggestions about any ideas that you might have for interesting blog posts or content to come out of the Games that you would love to see me focus on. If we take on your idea, you will have EXCLUSIVE rights to publish that piece of content first on your blog before anyone else gets it (we will share ahead of publishing it) and we will credit you with the idea and link back to your site. Finally, all bloggers that want to take part will be added to a list on this blog post, hopefully driving even more traffic in your direction as a participating blogger.

Easy enough? Let me know what you think or if you are willing to be part of this experiment. If it works, everyone will win … our client (Lenovo) will get more attention to their site and marketing efforts, you will have exclusive and interesting content about a topic that is relevant and heavily searched (Google linkbait, anyone?) and we will have a chance for our content to reach a wider audience. So, will you join the experiment?

Note: Please help spread the word about this through your social networks – here is a shareable link to this post: http://www.tinyurl.com/beijingexperiment

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 This past week in the string of posts about the book coming out, I’ve been stockpiling ideas for "real" blog posts and wanting to write about them more and more. Thankfully now that I launched the Personality Matters blog, I will post most of the updates about the book there and refocus on marketing strategy and insights here. I can’t promise I won’t share the occasional post about the book … but I know that you’re giving me your time to read this blog because you want marketing ideas and you want lots of them. So this post is about one I’m particularly excited about.

The Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team recently finalized the details to take the lead on what I would have to call my dream project. Those who know me know that I am what you might call a full on Olympic enthusiast. I went to college in Atlanta and was there for the 1996 Olympics. I moved to Sydney in 1998 and lived there during the Sydney Olympics, and my first son was born right in the middle of the Athens Olympics (during the women’s marathon, ironically). So I’ve been there and seen it, and more importantly, I think it is a world stage that nothing else even comes close to.

Which brings me to this very ambitious project that we are helping Lenovo with. David Churbuck, our main client, posted about the idea behind the project on his blog and it is a brilliant summary of a big vision that Lenovo and David himself has for this project. Here it is in a nutshell:

The Problem: Media coverage of the Olympics has become about melodrama that is broadcasted as "real" stories. But those producers only choose the athletes who have overcome quadruple knee surgery and the lack of a college degree to become a world champion … in other words, the extreme stories.

The Insight: What about the real athletes who spend every day training and working hard just to get to the Olympics whether they have a shot of winning or not?  Their voices could be the most powerful and this Olympics more than any other promises to offer the chance for them to do that.

The Project: We are seeking 100 potential Olympic athletes from around the world to all start and maintain a blog all about their experience leading up to and during the Games. In return, Lenovo is offering all participants the chance to use a new IdeaPad laptop for their blogging and help from our team to set up and maintain their blogs. 

This is a big project on a scale that is completely global, multi-lingual and very ambitious. Lenovo, to their credit, are not content to sit back with their sponsorship of the Olympic Torch Relay and Olympic Village (already considerable efforts) and call it a job well done.  If this is the year for Olympics 2.0, this program should be one of the best examples of it. Our main goal right now is finding Olympic athletes, so if you know any (or you happen to be one), please get in touch with myself rohit [dot] bhargava [at] ogilvypr.com or David.

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