Watch out! The Olympic Logo Police are here.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin (Torino), Italy the "Olympic Sponsor Logo Enforcement Squad" made athletes cover their equipment sponsor's logos with duct tape because they're not Official IOC Sponsors. You can read more about it on Yahoo here and here.

Does this mean that all future non-compliant logos will be covered in Beijing (site of the 2008 Summer Olympics)? How is the IOC going to enforce this policy? The Brand Police can't possibly entirely enforce this...right?


To combat this problem, companies such as Target, which has no European expansion plans, cleverly decided to wrap the subway cars in Turin.

This reminded me of what happened at the State Fair of Texas before. Over four million visitors pass through the State Fair spending over $23 million annually. The official automobile sponsor of the State Fair is Chevrolet (GM). Lincoln (Ford) had to introduce their new sedan but wasn't allowed on the fair grounds. So what did they do? They had tents with the car in them in adjacent parking lots. Then they hired people to wait outside the exits and approach exiting fair-goers with test drive offers and other incentives.