I noticed a truly amazing thing while watching the
Olympics on TV the other night.
It wasn’t the atmosphere in the stadium. It wasn’t
the outstanding performances of Jessica, or Mo, or The Ginger Fella. It wasn’t
even Gaby Logan’s Shoddy Cardboard Big Ben Gold Medal totalizer®.
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| Gaby Logan’s Shoddy Cardboard Big Ben Gold Medal totalizer® |
No, it was something much more inconsequential;
something you may not even have noticed at all. It was the colour purple.
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The
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Purple is everywhere: hanging from the rafters, adorning
the many thousands of volunteers who keep everything moving, around the necks
of medalists; it’s even the colour of the podium every athlete aims to end up
standing on.
What’s wrong with purple I hear you ask? Nothing. I
like purple. Purple is a perfectly nice colour. The trouble is that purple just
so happens to be the main colour of one of the Games’ main sponsors.
A simple tweet about the podium making a Twitterer
hanker after a bar of Dairy Milk was where it started. Quite a funny gag I thought,
but the more I considered it, the more I wondered if there was indeed an
ulterior motif behind the games’ branding beside it looking quite nice and
feeling a bit regal.
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| The funny Tweet. |
Ok, let’s ignore the fact that I find it immoral
that a maker of fatty chocolate treats should be allowed anywhere near a
festival celebrating the quest for physical perfection. That’s beside the
point.
What I find hard to believe is that LOCOG would
accidently allow the branding of a sponsor to match the branding of the Games.
In my experience, it’s difficult enough to get a 50-word piece of copy through
LOCOG - it’s like walking a minefield with elephantiasis of the ankles. So the
decision to use the colour purple, or the decision to accept the purple brand
as a sponsor (whichever came first), is frankly baffling.
Surely there were meetings in which sketches were
shared? Then artist’s impressions, then material samples, print previews, dressing
sessions, fittings and so on and so forth? Surely during one of these meetings,
perhaps in which a bar, or bars, of chocolate might even have featured on the
table, someone should have noticed the similarity of the purple in the stadium
and the purple wrapping the chocolate?
Or is this all just a ridiculously implausible
accident?
Forget Bradley Wiggins – the true winner of these
games is Cadbury’s.
In my mind, the only way the Games could push its
products any further would be if Curly Wurlys replaced the relay race batons.
Mmm… relay race batons.
