Disown the Podium

Vancouver Olympics’ Own the Podium

Are you about up to here with all this Own the Podium blabber coming from the Canadian Olympic system?

I was pretty dubious about this Canadian Olympic tagline long before the Games started. I am, of course, far more dubious now that it is unraveling before our eyes.

Right from the beginning, Own The Podium – an ad man’s slogan right out of the 1980s – had a hollow ring to it that you suspected was going to turn into a marketing and public relations nightmare.

Not only was it uncharacteristically bold and arrogant, it had a tough-guy bravado about it that was unlikely to be matched by reality.

I’m sure whoever dreamed it up wanted that kind of bravado to rally the Canadian public and whip  athletes into superhuman efforts that would surpass the inherent mediocrity in most of them.

In the real – i.e., non-advertising – world, the truth is that in any collection of people, the majority are mediocre.

Taglines and slogans must be authentic

There’s a lesson here for any organization that still thinks it can convince everyone to open their wallets with a mere slogan or tagline. If it’s perceived as inauthentic, it will backfire on you.  And the ROI on it will be negative, not positive.

Today, we live in a more democratic world when any kind of falsehood is detected instantaneously and then ripped apart on social media.

So how did the creators of this spurious mantra actually believe they would get away with it?

It’s eminently easy to ridicule, as in the Americans pointing out that they might “rent” the podium during these Olympics, or sportswriters now referring to it as “blown the podium”?

Controlling the message is one thing: Controlling how that message is perceived is far different.

Problem with OTP, in my view, was that the designers weren’t really aiming at the athletes or the general public. Instead, they were really trying to win the minds of financiers, particularly government. 

I can almost imagine it four or five or six years ago, as a bunch of petering-out pols and corporate admen whipped themselves into a testosterone frenzy by convincing themselves that we, a nation with 35 million people, could outperform other nations 10 times our size by simply dreaming up a snappy slogan.

They did this so they could snare some of the millions of dollars required to train an athlete to world beating status. Think of China, which has been pouring who knows how much into its drive to become an Olympics power. In fact, it’s been estimated that after the Beijing Olympics, the price for winning a gold medal climbed to about $100 million.

Yes, OTP has had some good effect – resulting in better training for athletes, for example. And, although we won’t reach the impossible (although promised) heights of No. 1 in medal standings, we will do better in these Olympics than ever before.

But it was likely a one-shot deal and I suspect now that the Olympics is moving on to some other place, funding will be quietly cut.

We’ll probably Disown Own The Podium.