Olympic Sponsors View Promotional Tie-Ins as Golden Opportunities

For nearly two years, Walt Disney Co. has been paying sports heroes mounds of money to mumble four familiar words: I’m going to Disneyland.

Disney has made it a high-paying habit--up to $75,000 each--to capture world champion athletes on camera at the exact moment of victory, and then get them to utter those seven syllables about their Disney destination.

Who can forget that first ad--moments after the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in 1987, when a Disney film crew asked Giant quarterback Phil Simms, “Now that you’ve won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do next?� He gushed his Disney plans, on cue.

Since then, everyone from Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson to America’s Cup winner Dennis Conner has spoken those same words. Now, however, Disney is about to work some Olympic-sized magic into the campaign. And like Seagram’s--which is also pulling out all stops to cozy up its corporate images with the Summer Games--Disney has its eyes on the gold.

The U.S. Olympic Team--including many of the team’s 819 athletes--will film a plug at Disneyland. But not just any plug. This time, most of the athletes will already be at the amusement park, days before departing for Seoul, South Korea. What will the off-camera interviewer ask them? “Now that you’ve been to Disneyland, what are you going to do next,� the voice will ask. The athletes will respond in unison: “Go for the gold at Seoul.�

If Walt Disney himself had wished upon a star, he couldn’t have concocted a better scenario. But this took more than wishes and fairy dust. “We worked with the U.S. Olympic Committee for more than a year on this,� said Jack Lindquist, executive vice president of creative marketing concepts at Walt Disney Attractions. During the Winter Games, Disney filmed an ad that featured U.S. gold medal figure skater Brian Boitano. Now, Disney plans to send its film crews to Seoul in search of yet more commercial opportunities.

But Disney’s is just one example of the extremes that companies are now willing to go to in order to tie their images to Olympic glory. It is no longer enough to pay $2 million to $8 million just to lay claim to being an Olympic sponsor. These days, it’s all the promotion that goes with it that counts.

“Simply being the official widget of the Olympics does not provide excitement any more,� said John Krimsky, deputy secretary general of the USOC. “Today, we’ve gone far beyond that.

Disney, for example, will march Olympic athletes around Disneyland for a full week. The likes of track stars Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses may be waltzing down Main Street with Goofy and Pluto. And in a promotional tie-in, for one week Disney will donate $3 of every paid admission to the U.S. Olympic Team. The theme park will even set up a mini-Olympic Village for the week and give patrons special Olympic pins.

“I liken these things to a card game in college,� said Robert J. Dowling, president of the trade publication Sports Marketing News. “You start off with nickels and dimes, and before you know it, you’re throwing five dollar bills into the pool.�

These days, each company wants to be the Olympic sponsor that gets the most attention, Dowling says. “It’s an insatiable appetite,� said Dowling. “You keep feeding it and feeding it and feeding it.�

Sometimes, that can require real creativity. One company that was rejected as Olympic sponsor has still found a way to promotionally--if not patriotically--link itself to the glory.

That company is Seagram, best-known for its distilled spirits. But Seagram also makes several wine coolers. This year, Seagram asked the USOC if its wine cooler division could be an Olympic sponsor. As a promotional gimmick, it wanted to send families of Olympic athletes to Seoul. After all, Seagram’s reasoned, several beer makers have signed on as Olympic sponsors, so why not wine coolers?

Although the committee said no to Seagram, it is now reviewing its policy of not permitting wine cooler sponsors and could say yes as early as the 1992 Olympics, said the USOC’s Krimsky. In the meantime, Seagram decided the promotion was “too good to let die,� said Michael Trager, chairman of Sports Marketing & Television International, a Greenwich, Conn., sports marketing firm that is overseeing the Seagram promotion.

Besides, Trager said, Seagram had already purchased millions of dollars of air time on NBC. So Seagram still intends to send hundreds of family members to Seoul--but not as an official sponsor. Although the Seagram’s campaign doesn’t show the Olympic logo--or even mention the word Olympics--it does feature plenty of pictures of medal-wearing athletes.

“All Seagram wants is to sell its label,� said Dowling. “The whole thing comes down to the guy who walks into the supermarket and ends up buying some Seagram wine cooler instead of the wine cooler sitting on the shelf next to it because he thinks he’s supporting the Olympic athletes.�

Latest Ads Not Doing It for Burger King

Burger King’s ad agency may have a burger bungle on its hands.

The 6-month-old ad campaign, “We’d do it like you’d do it,� is a flop. And industry executives say the New York agency that created it, NW Ayer, could lose the $200-million Burger King business before the end of the year.

While Burger King executives deny that, the fast-food unit of Pillsbury Co. has reportedly warned Ayer that it is in danger of losing the business that it picked up last October. What’s more, Pillsbury named Philip L. Smith from rival General Foods Corp. as its new chairman late last month. And Smith is expected to make changes, fast. That usually involves an ad agency switch.

In a last-ditch effort to hang onto the account, Ayer has created a new ad campaign scheduled to break next month. Executives from both Ayer and Burger King refused to discuss the new advertisements. But the director of the new fast-food chain ads said the revised campaign features people dining at Burger King while light-heartedly discussing funny things that have happened to them while eating.

Leslie Dektor, the West Coast director best-known for the so-called shaky camera technique that he used in filming ads for Levi’s and AT&T;, said the ads now have no music--a major departure from fast-food advertising. And the theme, “We do it like you’d do it,� only appears on the screen for a few moments at the end.

But Dektor, who filmed three 30-second commercials for Burger King in Southern California, said the company is now reviewing the ads he made and may change them. “If Burger King just leaves the commercials as I’ve filmed them, it could help turn things around,� said Dektor. “Sometimes to run wonderful work takes wonderful guts. I just hope they have the guts to leave it the way it is.�

Burger King’s ad agency, meanwhile, is doing some switching within its own ranks. Late last month, Ayer reshuffled top management on Burger King’s West Coast business. Jim Signorelli was named vice president and management supervisor for the Burger King Western division account, which includes a 17-state territory. Signorelli previously held the same post in Ayer’s Chicago office.

But Signorelli declined to speak to a reporter. And executives from Ayer’s New York office also declined to discuss Burger King advertising until its new campaign is unveiled. “We don’t want to make any comment until then,� said Victoria Horstmann, assistant director of corporate communications.

In the meantime, a Burger King spokeswoman concedes that the No. 2 fast-food maker has asked Ayer to “refine and enhance� its advertising. “We think that we are strategically in the right direction,� said Joyce Myers, “but we’ve asked them to improve some things, like the casting and the music.�

Just how bad is Burger King’s current ad campaign. “It’s a complete flop,� said Dave Vadehra, president of the New York research company, Video Story Board Testing, which publishes a quarterly ranking of the most popular TV commercials.

“It may be one of the least memorable campaigns ever for Burger King,� he said. Since the Burger King campaign broke, it has never ranked among even the 20 “most remembered� TV commercials, he said. Considering the amount of money spent on Burger King advertising, he said, “that is very bad.�