London 2012: Olympics Advertising Tightly Enforced - Huffington Post
Olympics organizers are doing what they can to eliminate competition for their sponsors. Too much maybe?
Several media outlets are making sport of the London Olympics' so-called "Brand Exclusion Zone" in Olympic Park and general uptightness elsewhere. While many venues will be patrolled by what the Guardian has termed "branding police," Olympic Park will be in a virtual advertising lockdown, according to reports.
Many unofficial brands can expect to be treated like the interlopers they are for England's big party. Officials want to ensure that sponsors such as VISA, McDonald's and Samsung get their hundreds of millions of dollars' worth -- and that means eliminating guerrilla advertising.
While some critics believe jolly old London is being a gold-medal fuddy-duddy, judge for yourself.
Among the plans:
-- Preventing spectators from prominently displaying a competing brand on their clothing if they're suspected of shilling, as per London2012.com. So leave that Wendy's Hot 'N' Juicy T-shirt at home. The world's biggest McDonald's will be waiting for you.
-- Prohibiting athletes from Tweeting about brands that are not official Olympics sponsors, wrote the Guardian.
-- Accepting only VISA credit cards, as the BBC reported a while ago.
-- Cracking down on businesses that use marketing copy or signage that hint at the Olympics. Even already-existing corporate stadium names are being covered if they aren't official Olympics sponsors, the BBC said. Logos on toilets and hand dryers will be masked as well.
In all fairness, London2012.com assures vendors on its site that "business as usual" advertising is OK for shop signs and in-store promoting, but other areas around the venues will be subject to tighter restrictions "to prevent ambush marketing."
So what happened to the CAFE LYMPIC [sic] (photo above)? The "O" was there before apparently. Associated Press asked the manager, and he clammed up. As severe as the measures seem, let's hope gag orders aren't part of the deal.
London 2012: 640,000 tickets put on sale this month have been sold - The Guardian
London 2012 organisers have sold more than two-thirds of the remaining tickets that were put on general sale this week, with many sports sold out.
Of the 928,000 tickets first put on sale this month around 640,000 have been sold. That leaves around 300,000 still to be sold, plus a further 150,000 to 200,000 that will come back on to the market as seating configurations are finalised.
In addition to those sports that had sold out before the general sales window opened, the 70,000 general access tickets to the Olympic Park have also gone, as have race walk, mountain biking, trampoline and shooting.
Organisers said there was still good availability in volleyball, football, taekwondo, handball, basketball, boxing, beach volleyball, canoe sprint, table tennis and hockey. However, most of the remaining tickets are at high-price points.
Paralympic sales were also described as encouraging, with a further 125,000 tickets sold this week, taking the overall total to 1.2m. In all, there are 8.8m tickets available for the Olympics and 2m for the Paralympics.
While the figures suggest that 25 of the 26 Olympic sports will sell out, allowing Locog to hit its £650m revenue target with ease, organisers face an uphill battle to sell the remaining 1.3m football tickets.
Locog will also put tickets for the main climb in the cycling road race and the cycling time trial at Hampton Court on sale next week at £15. The move has proved controversial with cycling fans used to watching the action from the side of the road for nothing.
On the same day, 29 May, general access tickets to the tennis tournament at Wimbledon – allowing access to Henman Hill and the outside courts but not the show courts – will also be made available.
London 2012 organisers – who warned earlier this week that users would face waits of half an hour on the site at peak times but said that it had remained operational throughout – this week defended their record on ticketing, insisting that they have managed to balance fairness with revenue raising.
"Do I think we have delivered the fairest possible system? I absolutely do. We got it about as right as we could. We wanted to hit our revenue targets, we wanted full stadiums and we wanted to treat everyone as equally as we could," said Locog's deputy chairman, Sir Keith Mills.
London picked as test bed for Skynet-like Intel tech - The Register
London will be a guinea pig for future smart city technology after Intel pledged to spend a slice of £25m ($40m) on a new lab in the capital. The chipmaker will also plough millions into research centres dotted around Blighty.
Intel will set up the unwieldily monikered Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities in the capital in partnership with Imperial College and University College London, it announced yesterday at an event at 10 Downing Street.
The company will spend the £25m over the next five years on all five of its Collaborative Research Institutes, but wouldn't give the breakdown of exactly how much London would be getting. ICL and UCL will also chip in some dosh, but again no figures were bandied about.
At the same event, Chipzilla said it will open a string of research centres around the UK, investing around £45m in an Intel Labs Europe UK R&D network: this will employ 350 researchers in labs including the one in London and others in Brighton, Swindon and Aylesbury to start with, and five more to be decided on by the end of the year.
"It is investments like this that will help us put the UK on the path we need to take to create new jobs, new growth and new prosperity in every corner of our country," Chancellor George Osborne said at the launch.
"We are determined to make the UK the best place to do business in the world and a great place for technology companies to invest and build new business. It is encouraging to see major tech partners like Intel investing in this country as a result of the policies that the Government has put in place," he self-congratulated.
Intel will use the London lab to suss out smart city technology and it will also team up with Shoreditch's Tech City entrepreneurs to use their "social media expertise" to "identify and analyse emerging trends with cities".
"Using London as a testbed, researchers will explore technologies to make cities more aware by harnessing real-time user and city infrastructure data," the company said in a statement, describing similar Skynet-like smart city research elsewhere.
"For example, a sensor network could be used to monitor traffic flows and predict the effects of extreme weather conditions on water supplies, resulting in the delivery of near real-time information to citizens through citywide displays and mobile applications."
Rattner: City under pre-planned stress
Intel CTO Justin Rattner also said that the London Olympic games would give the firm a great opportunity to look at a city under pressure and figure out where the weak points are.
"London is, as everyone knows, the host city to the 2012 summer Olympic Games, and we plan to use the event to understand the experiences of a city under pre-planned stress. What systems worked or didn’t work and why? How were the daily lives of the citizens, workers, and businesses of London affected?" he wondered out loud.
As well as giving Intel the opportunity to see it mess up, London is also a good choice for the research institute as the fifth largest city in the world.
"It has the largest GDP in Europe, and with over 300 languages and 200 ethnic communities, its diversity is a microcosm of the planet itself, offering an exciting test bed to create and define sustainable cities," Rattner enthused. ®
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