Anti-sponsorship

[L00b]

Example: Visa has demanded (and LOCOG has cravenly agreed) that all Mastercard payments be rejected a the Games and that all Mastercard ATMs be disabled.

I would extremely surprised if LOCOG has indeed agreed and implemented this (or will), as Card Scheme rules (jointly agreed and enacted by Visa, Mastercard, AMEX and a few other "plastic heavyweights") prohibit this practice.

 

I very much doubt it is in LOCOG's capacity/remit to do/agree so, as well (they might have agreed to Visa, only to to find out later that they are not empowered to do so in the least - or, well, as their counsel and their liability insurer will soon find out )

 

Never mind considering the major banks (card issuers, members of Card Schemes as well) which own and operate the ATMs (and are increasingly busy outing Solos/Maestros for 'debit' Mastercards).

 

Do you have a verifiable source?

[dosxuk]

Example: Visa has demanded (and LOCOG has cravenly agreed) that all Mastercard payments be rejected a the Games and that all Mastercard ATMs be disabled.

 

Has VISA demanded this, or have LOCOG tendered for payment providers to install and supply the hundreds of cash points / payment systems which are required for the games?

 

The thing with the main sponsors is they're not there just because they bunged some cash at the IOC / LOCOG and have been left to run riot over the marketing department. For example:

 

Coca Cola provides all the soft drinks to staff / volunteers / participants for free

Acer provides all the computers and servers used by the organisers and staff at venues

Atos Origin provides all the IT services without which there'd be no games

GE power distribution, backup power

McDonald’s on site catering

Omega official timing and statistics

Panasonic thousands of monitors, tvs and displays

Samsung - no idea

Visa ATMs, payment processing

 

adidas volunteer uniforms

BP - no idea

British Airways - no idea

BT intrasite communications and broadcast links

 

By negotiating such sponsorships, the actual costs of those services can be drastically lowered, especially when you can organise deals, like Panasonic loaning all their equipment and reclaiming it at the end of the games. Without these sponsorships, LOCOG would have to buy all these things at commercial rates, probably adding a few £bn onto the overall bill.

[L00b]

Visa ATMs, payment processing

Edit (of sorts), to tie dosxuk's snap post with mine: I very much doubt VISA is supplying ATMs or POS hardware themselves, they've been out of the customer-facing hardware for a very, very long time.

 

It's generally banks that commission/specify such hardware (from specialist manufacturerss, e.g. Verifone, Siemens-Nixdorf, etc) and retailers that foot the POS hardware rent/purchase/usage bill (retailer card transactions being 'acquired' by the hardware-supplying bank). Banks foot the ATM bill themselves.

 

"All" that the likes of VISA, Mastercard, AMEX etc. do, in terms of payment processing, is administer the cards and payment globally on their servers (which banks own which cards, reconciliating what has been paid by whom to whom and how much is owed by who to who, at 'banking scale'), after the banks' servers have already done a fair bit of 'local' reconciliation/data crunching.

 

VISA may well provide some 'London Olympics-dedicated' card processing back-end resources/capacity to avoid bottlenecks, but more than that and I'd have questions about exactly how much profit is in it for them (e.g. mark-up on subcontractor-provided hardware).

 

All very Off-Topic, with apologies, but I do like to get to the bottom of potentially sensationalist claims

[barleycorn]

I listened to a R4 programme recently which almost temps me to join this pointless boycott. The International Olympic Committee are so protective of their brand, that they were taking legal action against many schools and local groups from using the word "Olympic" in their events.

 

So, for example, schools renaming their sports days as "Olympic Sports Day" to encourage a feeling of participation were being prevented.

 

Indeed. I did wonder at this as I didn't think they would be able to protect words such as Olympic and Olympian. Seems I was wrong.

 

http://www.london2012.com/documents/brand-guidelines/guide-to-protected-games-marks.pdf

 

jb

[anywebsite]

Yet one cannot spend what what does not have. It's excess borrowing that caused many of the UK's problems!

 

If people spend less then other people make less money. If everybody spends less money, then everybody earns less money & can no longer afford to pay their debts.

 

Big cuts in spending across the board, personal, private sector business & most recently government have meant there are less people earning money, so they can't pay debts they could afford when they took them out. This was all caused by the banks lending too much & then suddenly stopping.

 

Like it or not, lots more borrowing & printing a lot more money is the only thing that can save us, but it all depends on who they give it to how well it'll work, just giving it directly to banks is no use at all if the banks still wont lend.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

Let's start with this by Lucy Bannerman in The Times, shall we?

 

Make no mistake – the Olympic Torch Relay is only partly about an unsung someone passing on a flame.

This is the Coca-Cola roadshow. It’s the Samsung circus. The deserving person in the tracksuit may be the main attraction, but it is a slick corporate cavalcade that is shepherding them through the streets.

If it hasn’t passed by your house already, it will soon be coming to you.

Does it matter who is paying for this relay? People are loving it. The turnout across Scotland has been huge and if any of the crowds were queasy about the big companies in control, as we rolled through a string of small towns earlier this week — aboard the blaring Coke float known as the Beat Box — they certainly weren’t showing it.

“The Olympic Torch is just minutes away!” shouts the girl with the microphone. Around her, young, enthusiastic girls and guys in red bounce about the open-sided bus, dancing to songs like Footloose and Twist and Shout. Under their feet, trays of iced water are keeping free Coke cold for the next stop on the itinerary, while the dancers hop on and off the float at this one, pressing free commemorative bottles into the grasping hands of the crowd. They clap their Coca-Cola beat pads above their heads and tell the people of Angus to make some noise. The crowds do just that.

Microphone girl attempts to pronounce the name of this morning’s town — Brechin — before losing her nerve halfway through, and returning to her fail-safe slogans. “You’re going down in Olympic history!” she yells.

For those who have not yet experienced the sight of the Olympic Torch convoy, let me explain the drill. An hour before the flame appears, the advance parties start arriving. A Mini Cooper with giant headphones pitches up. The Coca-Cola stall is opened. The Lloyds TSB ice-cream van pumps up the volume. Street entertainers on bouncing stilts, breakdancers and men with whistles and scooters enliven the crowds on behalf of the Bank of Scotland.

Teams on foot advance up the kerbside, dressing the crowds in Samsung blue, doling out branded sausage balloons, known as “bam bams”, for people to bang together when the cameras start rolling...

 

The smiley sponsor squads remind me of the hapless minister in the political satire In the Loop, who finds himself used as “room meat” to bulk up the numbers at an important meeting. These happy-clapping warm-up acts are torch meat.

Naturally, Coca-Cola won’t reveal how much they pay the Olympic organisers to make this magic happen. Of the three relay sponsors, the drinks giant and Samsung are among the so-called “top” sponsors of the International Olympic Committee, who will have paid collectively up to £1 billion for marketing rights over the four-year cycle leading up to London 2012. The third relay sponsor, Lloyds TSB, is one of the top domestic partners.

Much has been made of the organisers’ determination to keep these sponsors sweet; from the tight restrictions over Visa cash machines in the Olympic Park, to the gagging orders preventing other companies that have helped to deliver the Games from publicising their contribution.

Officially, those kind of “brand exclusion zones” apply only around the venues and the Olympic Park, not the relay.

[anywebsite]

I still don't understand your argument here. What's wrong with corporate sponsorship? Did you want the tax payers to foot the entire bill? Do you think if Coca-Cola stops sponsoring the Olympics we wont bid for it ever again?

 

Are you anti-corporate? Anti-capitalist? Anti-Olympics? or just against it being held in London?

 

It should generate extra business that equals the taxpayer cost, there will be some extra tax revenue from that & extra business activity is always welcome.

 

There are much bigger things, like this, which has cost 10x as much & will probably have about as much effect on growth. Are you boycotting the Tory party sponsors now too?

[Jeffrey Shaw]

Nothing at all is wrong with corporate sponsorship.

But its existence need not oblige everyone to support its practitioners.

[anywebsite]

You're free to ignore it, they aren't obliging anybody to do anything. I just think organising a boycott seems a bit extreme & you're unlikely to get a lot of committed support.

 

These are some really big companies, some of them can be hard to boycott, have you changed bank because of it? Changed credit card even? changed over to a cable phone line (made sure Virgin aren't sponsoring it too?)? broken a 20 can a day Coca Cola habit? Would you really pay more for your flight if BA were cheapest for a late booking?

 

If you look hard enough you can probably find other things these corporate rivals sponsor that you object to, if the Olympics is worth boycotting over.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

To clarify: I'm not organising a boycott! In post #1, I merely gave one way of objecting to the entire hoo-hah.