ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 9, 1996 TAG: 9607090035
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ATLANTA
SOURCE: MARC RICE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SOME OF THE WORLD'S biggest companies are making sure you see much more than the Olympic Games.
The new statue of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, offers a revealing glimpse of how far the games have come since the baron's days.
From one angle, de Coubertin appears to be stepping from the stately Greek-columned base right into Bud World, a high-energy entertainment pavilion and marketing tool for the King of Beers and one of many such corporate productions that have sprouted in Atlanta for the Summer Olympics.
It's anyone's guess what de Coubertin, who saw the Olympics as a means to uplift humanity, would think about Bud World. One thing is sure: he couldn't walk across the street in Atlanta this summer without being bombarded by Olympic banners, billboards, tents, stages and props festooned with corporate logos.
The Atlanta Games, to an extent way beyond any previous Olympics, are being brought to you by Coca-Cola, Budweiser, AT&T, McDonald's, Swatch and other business giants.
Thus, downtown Atlanta is now the home of such landmarks as Coca-Cola Olympic City, Bud World and its accompanying Clydesdale Park, AT&T's Global Olympic Village and a bright blue behemoth called ``The Century of Motion,'' courtesy of General Motors Corp.
Other companies not represented by such attractions have their logos prominently displayed on hundreds of Olympic banners hanging from street lamps.
``For people who go to the Olympics, it may be like the people who go to certain kinds of professional conventions, where 50 years ago people went to hear the lectures and now they go to the exhibits and trade show,'' said Michael Jacobson, author of ``Marketing Madness'' and former head of the Center for the Study of Commercialism.
``A lot of people will go to the Olympics and only go to the trade show. The athletes are becoming the sideshow,'' he said.
Commercialism at the Olympics didn't begin in Atlanta. But there's a reason this summer's games, which start in less than two weeks, will take the concept to new heights.
Some of the world's biggest companies paid record amounts, in many cases $40 million apiece, for the right to exploit the venerable rings and torch symbols of the games. And they aim to get a return on their huge investment.
That $40 million check just gets them in the door. Some are spending hundreds of millions more for the actual promotions.
``You have to justify the bottom-line investment,'' said Jeff Bliss, who heads the Olympic sponsor program for Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp., which launched the sponsorship of its packaged meats division by laying a 1,996-foot-long hot dog around the football field of the Georgia Dome.
Bliss and other marketing executives deny the games have become overly commercialized.
The point is to generate goodwill with consumers. It would be self-defeating to go overboard, they say.
``We care about what our consumers think and know how they feel. We know that because we listen to their opinions,'' said Mark Preisinger, a spokesman for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola's Olympic program.
``What we hear from them is it's not an issue,'' Preisinger said. ``Believe me, if we heard from consumers that we were not doing this the right way or were overdoing it, we'd change.''
Some critics say the heavy commercial presence at the 1996 games is a natural outgrowth of Atlanta's business-is-everything psyche. There's a grain of truth here, but there also is much more to it.
The corporate presence at the Olympics has been growing rapidly since 1984, when the Summer Games in Los Angeles showed off the vast money-making power of the event.
Major sponsors such as Coca-Cola, IBM and McDonald's already have spent big bucks to sponsor the Olympics into the next century, and presumably they'll want to capitalize on their investment just like in Atlanta.
A few things have set Atlanta's games apart from other Olympics, though, making them especially ripe for the marketing onslaught.
The major factors are the size of the games - the biggest ever - and Atlanta organizers' substantial reliance on corporate funding.
Although taxpayers are contributing many millions of dollars for such things as security and road improvements, the core funding of the Atlanta Games comes from the private sector. About one-third of the $1.7 billion bill for the Atlanta Games is being paid for by sponsorship rights fees.
``The games people will see in Atlanta could not have taken place on that grand a scale without corporate assistance. The tradeoff is the right to use the Olympic symbols,'' said Scott Mall, a spokesman at the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.
For marketers, the Atlanta Games provide a utopian mix of the Olympic centennial, 2 million people in attendance and an Eastern time zone setting that allows NBC to show about two-thirds of its Olympic coverage live to the U.S. audience.
``Some people see it as commercialism. To marketers, it's a chance to make an impression,'' said Jed Pearsall, a sports marketing consultant in Newport, R.I.
People are accustomed to a lot of marketing big events, and will not be shocked by the commercial presence at the Olympics, said Bob Lachky, vice president for Budweiser brands at St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch Co.
``It's part of the landscape, part of American culture, too. It's a capitalistic society,'' he said. ``You've got to have a little whimsy and fun.''
Each sponsor project had to pass muster with Olympic organizers, and some proposals have been rejected, Mall said. He would not say what has been turned down.
``You can't be an arbiter of taste beyond a certain point,'' Mall said. ``There are standards. Anyone could say you missed it ... they have every right to that opinion.''
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP Wherever the Olympic torch goes, the dollars andby CNBlogos of major corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola inevitably
follow. color.