Yesterday the Olympic Games Rio 2016 started with a colorful and happy opening ceremony, but there are several brands unhappy because of the rule #40 of marketing and advertising made it by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). We will explain to you some of the weirdest marketing rules for Rio 2016.
Some brands such as a MacDonald’s, Coca-Cola, P&G, and Visa are official sponsors and they paid almost 100 million dollars to sponsor the Olympic Games. But sometimes money is not enough to have the main presence in that event because non-official brands use ambush marketing to show them and sometimes they have better results than the official sponsor. For that reason, the IOC established the rule #40.
The rule #40 determined some protection for the official sponsor brands and banned ambush marketing, here are some of the banned activities for non-official brands:
1- They could not use in theirs ads hashtags and words such as Rio2016, TeamUSA, faster, higher, stronger, summer, Olympic, Olympics, and Olympians. Neither uses words like effort, victory, performance, games, gold, silver, bronze, medal, sponsors. The IOC considers those words as intellectual property.
2- Brands who sponsor Olympians (athletes) but not the games could not use games Visual or audio brand elements. Here is one example from Under Armour who sponsor Michel Phelps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh9jAD1ofm4
3- The athletes could not mention unofficial brands in their social media accounts . If they do, they could be fired from the competition and lose their medals.
4- These conditions apply until three days after the games have finished.
The OIC argues that these conditions protect the event of over-commercialization, what do you think about it? Is it fair and unfair?
