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June 07, 2007
No! Logo!
Rod Liddle on the London Olympic logo and Wolff-Olins, the "branding" wankers who came up with it:
[D]elve a little deeper and you will find that our design, our little logo, gives you a pretty good flavour of Britain and its delusions and confusions. Not that harmless little image itself, but the fatuous rubbish which lies behind it. ... [C]heck out their website, enter the Wolff-Olins house of cards, where there’s much, much more of this pretentious, chest-beating drivel. They offer companies ‘potential platforms for action’. And then — God only knows what this means — ‘We think brands need to be less controlling, more generous.’ How precisely will they do this? ‘We help you invent new ways that move the world forward.’ Oh, good, many thanks for that, gentlemen. And then a rare moment of truth, or the truth as they have it: ‘Brand isn’t marketing. It’s everything.’
...
[B]oth Wolff-Olins and the Prime Minister are trying desperately to tell you that the whole event is really nothing to do with athletics; that’s why that bloody word ‘inclusive’ crops up so often. ... Tony Blair has already said that he believes the Games should inspire people to change their lives. The Wolff-Olins film (which you can see on their benighted website) does not show wonderful athletes running and jumping and throwing things, it depicts instead browbeaten members of our ethnic minority and disabled communities struggling, in a very real sense, to come to terms with their daily struggle for existence, uplifted a little (not too much, obviously) by the Olympic Ideal, whatever that might be.
The notion that the Games might be a chance for us all to see brilliant sportsmen in action and thrill to the achievement of dedicated and talented individuals is here utterly subverted; the Olympics isn’t about any of that. It’s about ordinary people — quite miserable ordinary people, come to that — doing ordinary things, like riding a bicycle for a few hours every day. In other words, Wolff-Olins has rebranded the Olympics to mean exactly the opposite of what it was intended to mean. Not bad for £400,000, I suppose, all things considered.
Posted by Chris Selley at June 7, 2007 06:17 PM
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Comments
And here I thought they were using fellatio to re-brand the Olympics. Maybe I'm just a dirty old man, but that's what it look like to me.
Posted by: Sean at June 8, 2007 10:00 PM