VANOC sure cares a lot about their brand image, but do they care about any of their sponsors?
It’s interesting that when I searched “Olympia Restaurant Controversy 2010,” nothing came up. That’s strange… a major conflict between VANOC and a local restaurant should be highly publicized; and at the time, it was. But now, it almost seems as if some powerful body has tried to cover it up. Could this body be VANOC? Well, that’s a whole different story altogether. The important thing to look at is what we know is concrete. VANOC got angry because Olympia used the olympic rings as their logo. The restaurant had been using these rings for 15 years, so they were not about to throw that part of their history away. The small business stood up to the giant organizing committee, and they won. The effort VANOC put into trying to get them to cover it up is astounding, however. They were devastated that a symbol of the olympics was being used for something unaffiliated with VANOC, which according to their infringement policy, is highly illegal. This is funny, because they didn’t seem to care too much about TELUS’s ambush marketing against Bell. It seems all they really care about is themselves.