Negative Publicity Threatens Success of Beijing Olympics

There is a lot of buzz going around about how the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Beijing, China this August. Large numbers of activists protesting the games are making it difficult for advertisers such as Adidas, Coca-Cola (KO), General Electric (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Kodak, McDonald's (MCD), Samsung, Visa to run their promotional campaigns which began promoting the event several months ago and is leaving some of them feeling uneasy about their ability to sponsor the event without the threat of violence.

Just yesterday two Tibetan demonstrators made headlines worldwide when they disrupted a torch lighting ceremony taking place in Ancient Olympia, Greece. There have been disputes regarding the human rights polices in China and the two protesters took the opportunity to make their opinions known on a rather grand stage. "Their evil purpose is to produce turmoil to interrupt and destroy the 2008 Beijing Olympics, whose theme is peace, and to destroy our country's good stability and unity in order to reach their evil goal of splitting the mother country," said Shan Huimin, a spokeswoman for China's Public Security Ministry.



Amidst the adverse publicity that China is receiving due to rioting and violence, the country remains hopeful that they can improve their public image. Sponsors, however, remain sceptical about how events such as the disruption of the torch lighting ceremony will ultimately affect their own public images. This is part of the tasks one must deal with as it relates to International PR which we talked about in class a few weeks back. I think it will be interesting to see how the well recognized American corporations will deal with the tension leading up to the Olympic Games and whether or not some of them will decide to pull their sponsorship in favor of a better public image. There will certainly be much more regarding this topic in the news in the four months leading up to this monumental global event.