Cape Town’s olympic bid captured the spirit of the city but not the continent, writes Ferial Haffajee
It was almost as if the the spin-doctors and mega-marketeers responsible for selling Cape Town’s Olympic bid took a late swig of Energade to boost a flagging campaign.
Or it may have been the countdown to decision day which has finally seen the flurry of bid-hype needed to make the Olympic pitch a household concept.
The bid dabbles in the world of winning hearts and minds. It is here, more than at any other stage, that marketing is important. Local support (or “buy-in” in Olympic-speak) for the bid is an important part of the final decision.
The SABC got on the bus less than a month ago. It’s been joined now by M-Net and a handful of commercial radio stations. The national broadcaster dug in by sponsoring advertising space worth R5-million on both television and radio to take the sales pitch into every home. It has given one in five prime-time minutes to Olympics fever, boosting popular participation in the campaign which until then had been a rather low-profile and Cape Town-based bid.
“The marketing of the bid was not Africanised. Not even South Africanised. It was Cape Town’s bid,” says advertising executive Mohale Ralebitso. The Herdbuoys agency was drafted in near the end of the bid process to take advantage of the fact that Cape Town was Africa’s first real chance of bringing the games to this continent. “We needed to use Africa as the differentiator,” says Ralebitso. Instead, the first campaign focused on Cape Town with the slogan: “If Cape Town wins, we all win.” For Ian Douglas of Sun West (Sun International’s Cape-based subsidiary), “This campaign captured the spirit of Cape Town. But whether it’s a truly African bid is another story.”
The marketing oversight did not go unchecked by politicians who began baying for change.
Herdbuoys went to their drawing boards and penned a cheeky campaign to remind the International Olympic Committee that while Africa’s athletes helped keep the torch burning, their home continent had yet to make it on to the Olympic map. One billboard, for example, chalks up a score of 204 to 0. African athletes have won 204 gold medals in Olympic history. No African city has hosted the games.
Tessa Chamberlain, a client services director at Young&Rubicam who helped design Pick ‘n Pay’s Olympics campaign, agrees that the original marketing of the bid concentrated on Cape Town. “But the sponsors bolstered the campaign. They gave it national significance,” she says. Six corporate sponsors each gave R7,5-million to the bid, winning in return the right to use the multi-coloured Africa logo which symbolises South Africa’s campaign. While Pick ‘n Pay put in place a three-layered plan which included Olympics merchandising, above-the-line advertising and in-store promotions, most sponsors did not exploit the potential of the logo. Instead, for most it was a corporate social responsibility exercise.
“There was no guarantee of returned business,” says Darlene Stroh of Mercedes Benz, adding that her company supported the bid because the country needs another rallying point like that provided by the Rugby World Cup and the Africa Cup of Nations. Others, like Unifruco, faced a funding crunch, minimising the use they could make of the bid logo.
It should not have fallen to the corporate sponsors to market the bid. But it’s not easy to trace where blame for the missed opportunities lies. Corporate sponsors look to other businesses for missing the boat. “It’s a great, great tragedy. There could have been more public marketing. The country needed higher profiling,” says Stroh. And should Cape Town get the nod from the lords of the rings this evening, there’s going to have to be a marketing rethink.
“The exercise of bidding has been an enormous learning experience. And we would do things differently in future,” says Douglas.