The Olympic Logo
I know I’m coming a little late to the game here, but I feel the need to weigh in.
It’s ugly and it’s here to stay. I’m starting to get used to it and we’ll doubtless come to if not like it, tolerate eventually, but that doesn’t change what an amazing bungle the commission have made of this.
Aside the fact it’s just not that nice to look at, I’m a little bit insulted is this constant statement that it was aimed at young people. It’s both patronising for those who aren’t the youth (who are essentially being told that it’s not their Olympics), and to the young people to whom it tells ‘we don’t respect your sense of taste and think you will fall for any brightly coloured pattern’. You almost wonder if this is how it survived the process, whenever anyone felt any self-doubt over if it looked good they just reminded themselves that ‘It’s not for me…it’s for the youth! They’ll love it’. It’s alright everyone, the Emperor’s not naked, he’s just wearing a very fine fabric.
The brand’s crime isn’t that it’s ugly (or that it causes seizures) but the attitude of the commission to the public backlash. Given that everyone hated it, they had two choices: Go back to the drawing board or just stick with it. Given the fact they’d spent £400,000 on the branding, their decision to carry forth with it can be defended but the attitude presented is quite revealing: “No, we don’t care what you think, we’re going to run these Olympics our way”- It shows a complete lack of understand on how to run the Olympics as a populist movement, which it really needs to become if it’s to have any lasting benefit. They managed to put themselves of the wrong side of the population on one of the most trivial matters possible, this is NOT a good sign for things to come.
What should they have done? It may sound corny but a public competition should have been held to find a logo. Joe Trippi said something very true about public involvement in projects like this: ‘Build it and they will come, but ask them and they will help build it‘. It would have been nice if they’d cottoned onto this in the first place but their failure to recognise the opportunity in doing this after the announcement of the previous logo shows they really don’t get how to make this a populist Olympics. For the commission to say ‘We’re sorry, we failed to find a logo that captured the imagination of the nation, so now we’re turning it over to you’ would not just guarantee a decent logo, it would involve people in the decision-process and give them a feeling of ownership over the Olympics. The turnaround would have demonstrated that they find our opinions important and trust our judgements and as a result of that, we’d be more willing to have some faith in what the commission is doing rather than constantly holding our breath and waiting to see what they screw up next.
