Patriot Hearts

by John Furlong

  Ultimately, our sponsorship total would amount to more than $750 million, which completely stunned the pundits and especially the IOC. We signed nearly 70 partners, and in each case the company had pretty much written the largest cheque it ever had for a sponsorship. It showed how important the association with Vancouver 2010 had become. An added bonus throughout this process was seeing what a company’s involvement in the Olympics meant to its employees. I recall flying to Calgary with Dave and Andrea to meet with the executives of Petro-Canada. The employees came down by the hundreds to the lobby, where they staged an in-house demonstration to let us know how badly they wanted to be Olympic partners. A sea of singing red-shirted employees was there to make an impression that would tug our heartstrings and touch our Canadian pride. And it worked. I had tears in my eyes.

  Still, I believe we could have raised tens of millions of dollars more from sponsorships if we had had greater authority over the entire process. But the IOC controlled business categories that would have been lucrative for us but were sold internationally by the Olympic committee itself. When the IOC sold a category, say to Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, we would get between 15 and 20 per cent of the deal and for that the company would get the same rights as Bell or RBC. We would clearly have done far better operating on our own but had to play by the IOC’s rules.

  One of our biggest disappointments was not being able to convince the IOC to allow us to have a competitive bid process in the beer category. God knows we tried. The IOC had signed a one-off deal with Budweiser that gave the company Olympic marketing rights up to 2008. That left us little time to negotiate a deal with Molson’s or anyone else after it expired. We did ultimately sign an agreement with Molson’s for a few million dollars, but it was nowhere near what we could have secured had we done a Tier 1 sponsorship deal with Molson early on. Molson’s still ended up being great partners.

  In the end, the IOC saw the situation for what it was and realized we had been hurt badly by the deal it signed with Budweiser and that we probably ended up losing tens of millions as a result. It was not one of the IOC’s better deals, for sure.

  Domestic television broadcast rights to our Games were also the IOC’s baby, but we were obviously intensely interested in the outcome. We believed that the more eagerness and passion we stirred up around our project, the more the networks in Canada would want to be involved. This would attract more lucrative bids, which would mean more revenue for us—in theory anyway.

  Negotiations had become complicated by the fact that we had signed the massive deal with Bell Canada. Bell was a corporate partner of CTV and desperately wanted the network to win the rights—it would make the telecommunication giant’s life simpler on so many levels.

  Bell CEO Michael Sabia phoned me up one day to ask if there was anything I could do to help CTV. I told him the best I could do was meet with the network’s CEO, Ivan Fecan, and talk to him about what we were trying to achieve and how they might best fashion the company’s presentation to the IOC. In fact, I met with representatives from CTV and CBC to talk about our goals and dreams. The reception I received from the two networks couldn’t have been more different.

  The CBC didn’t seem at all interested in what we were trying to achieve. Its president presented CBC as a company that had done this many times, knew the drill, and frankly, thought Canadians expected them to cover these Games. The company was happy to talk partnerships but left little doubt about who would be calling the shots. Its executives didn’t seem to be moved by the fact that we were looking for a more collaborative approach. We wanted to work with a company that shared our values and was interested in helping us make our vision a reality. We also wanted to introduce every athlete on the Olympic team to every person in the country.

  CTV, in contrast, was widely enthusiastic about what we were trying to accomplish and completely open-minded. We quickly concluded that CTV would be the best broadcast partner for us, whatever the financial commitment it was prepared to make. The network would assure the Games received the saturation we had hoped for and saw the business advantage that went along with it. Still, we were extremely worried that the IOC might still favour the CBC, even if the bids were a distance apart in value. The IOC knew the CBC and felt comfortable doing business with the highly regarded, award-winning broadcaster.

  As the two companies gathered in Lausanne to pitch the IOC, I received an eleventh-hour call from Michael Sabia, who was sweating buckets and was especially worried about mobile-rights issues if CTV lost. He asked me to help. So I called Ivan Fecan, who was in Lausanne getting ready to give his final pitch. He too was biting his nails. Michael had asked me to give Ivan some frank advice about the company’s presentation the next morning. I told him it needed to be like the one we presented the IOC in Prague, as much about heart and soul as business. It needed to be respectful of the IOC and embrace the broad spirit of the Games. It had to be filled with emotion and energy, had to make people believe they desperately wanted the opportunity to make these Games special. Mostly, it needed to stress partnership. It was important that the company impress upon the IOC that it shared our values and ideals.

  As it turned out, Ivan and his group completely nailed it. I think it would have made a difference had the gap between CTV ’s and the CBC’s financial offers been close. But it wasn’t. The CBC was outplayed by the new kids on the block, ones who radically altered their approach so that no Canadian would miss a minute of the action. It was good for us and good for business.

  CTV bid $151 million for Olympic rights from 2008 through to 2012. Of that, $90 million was for the rights to 2010. It was the first time ever that a Winter Games bid had topped a Summer Games bid. The entire package was a record for Canada. It seemed as if almost every day of the Games the network set new records for viewership.

  We at VANOC were operating all along under the mistaken belief that a bigger television deal in Canada would mean more money for us. Otherwise, why would we be working so hard to drum up such intense interest in the bids, to create a competitive dynamic in order to drive up the price, if there was nothing in it for us? In fact, when you added CTV’s offer to what the IOC got from NBC and others around the globe it added up to almost $4 billion, a new record. In our original bid, we expected the IOC to contribute roughly US $348 million toward our Games, money that mostly came from television revenues. Our number was based on what the IOC had shared with previous Winter Games. But now, the IOC had decided to put us and London on fixed amounts based on what it gave to Turin 2006 and Beijing 2008, plus inflation. We didn’t think this was fair and bluntly told the IOC so.

  We weren’t able to convince the Olympic committee to give us a greater percentage of television revenues. It didn’t want to set a precedent, which would mean London would be asking for the same thing a few years down the road. But the IOC did give us more money overall than it originally said it would and continued to help us when we were in very stormy seas.

  ONE THING THE sponsorship phase made clear was just how important our vision of uniting the country was in enticing national companies to join us in our mission. I sat in on dozens and dozens of meetings with CEOs who spoke passionately about wanting to be part of this great Canadian story. If the 2010 Olympics had been marketed as Vancouver’s or B.C.’s Games, we wouldn’t have received nearly the same level of interest from corporations across the country. In fact, I believe the Games would have been a financial disaster. A lesser vision and many of our friends would likely have sat out the experience.

  I think the radical approach we took will be one of the legacies from our Games—how it changed big-event marketing to some extent. We were able to prove to the country that marketing doesn’t have to be just about selling the rights to use a logo, but rather selling the rights to have a complete engagement, a complete affiliation. Ultimately, the companies that signed on helped us stage the Olympic Games. Yes, they put our logo on their products, but their men and women were involved in every way with the stag
ing of the Games. They were in the trenches with us and worked hard for our success. Many loaned employees to VANOC for a period of time. They were our everyday ambassadors and were everywhere—just as we had hoped.

  Our licensed products, in the meantime, also became runaway favourites. Our executive was stunned by the ever-growing numbers we were getting from sales, whether it was replicas of our mascots, pens, watches, water bottles or the famous Red Mittens.

  We unveiled our logo first. We called it Ilanaaq, the Inuit word for friend or buddy. The logo was based on the Inukshuk, the stone landmark figure the Inuit people have relied on for centuries as a signal. It was chosen by a panel of nine judges and picked from more than 1,600 entries. I was thrilled with it. I thought it represented the entire country, but particularly the North, and it was rooted in a profound and caring spirit. It was a stone beacon that visitors looking for the Games could rely on to guide them. A new Canadian icon, and it was ours.

  We were going to be making the announcement on a Saturday, live, on national television and in all time zones. I was watching Global BC news on the Friday night before the announcement when they led with an item about our new symbol. Apparently, someone told a reporter there he had seen it and described it for him. This was the foundation for a story filed by Ted Chernecki that mocked the design, which someone had sketched out on a piece of paper. The story just completely trashed what we had come up with, even though no one at the station had actually seen it.

  I was furious, as mad as I think I had ever been during my entire association with the Olympics. I phoned up the station right after taking a run at Dennis Skulsky, Global’s top executive on the west coast at the time. Dennis shared the view that Global had misbehaved badly and apologized unconditionally. When I got the news director, Ian Haysom, on the phone, I let him have it. I told him I was so angry watching the item I wanted to throw my cellphone against the wall. Not only did the story ridicule the design, but it also got the name of the winning designer wrong and ruined the real winner’s moment in the spotlight. My voice grew so loud and animated that my wife took Molly outside the house so she didn’t have to listen to my rant. If Ian got a word in I did not hear it. That was one of the few times I really lost my cool with the media.

  But while the logo was criticized initially, mostly by those expecting to see the Maple Leaf, those opinions quickly faded into the background as its popularity gained momentum across the country. Pretty soon there were school groups from Parker’s Cove, Newfoundland, to Port Coquitlam, B.C., building or designing Inukshuks in the classroom. You could drive down the Sea to Sky Highway or country roads in Quebec and Ontario and come across a stone replica of our logo.

  When it came time to unveil our mascots, we hired a local entertainment company, led by Patrick Roberge, to design a show that would be staged in a Surrey school theatre. We brought in a bunch of kids to welcome Sumi, Quatchi and Miga to our Olympic family. Mukmuk, a Vancouver Island marmot, was introduced as a sidekick. The media were placed strategically in the audience of children so they could see their smiles up close. It would be hard to be critical amid the hysteria generated by happy, screaming kids. As hoped, Quatchi and company didn’t attract the kind of criticism some Olympic mascots initially invite—to my great relief. (Unlike the poor folks in London, whose one-eyed mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, were trashed by everyone but children.)

  Quatchi was a sasquatch with boots and earmuffs who had the commanding presence of a hockey goalie. Miga was a mythical sea bear. Sumi, part whale, part bird and part bear, was the official mascot of the Paralympics. We originally thought we’d need a few sets of the mascots to make appearances around the country. The demand for them ended up being so great we had to increase the number tenfold.

  Like everything that was important at VANOC, the mascots had a champion, a mastermind lurking in the background. His name was Leo Obstbaum.

  Before Leo arrived on the scene at VANOC, there had been months of loud banter inside the organization about the “look” that we wanted to create, a look that would be evident in everything from backdrops to torches, a trail-blazing design that would separate us from all the other Olympics before us.

  In a perfect world, we would have had our own design team working inside the walls of VANOC to have greater control over what was produced—provided, of course, we had the horsepower and creative proficiency to deliver the kind of results that were needed. Ali Gardiner was heading up our young, fairly inexperienced brand and creative team. Well aware of our vulnerabilities, she was hunting for senior talent to help get us to the next level. That is when she came across Leo.

  Leo was from Buenos Aires and had done some creative work on the Summer Games in Barcelona in 1992. He had quite a bit of experience in designing mascots, specifically. Ali was convinced this was the guy we needed to inspire and build our design team, but English wasn’t his first language, and he also lacked experience working in Canada. An interview was set up with Dave Cobb and me.

  Leo was a charming guy, mid-thirties, thin, with a goatee. At first glance, he could easily have passed for a Spanish painter or a matador. I could tell he was nervous but I could also tell he wanted this job desperately, even though his résumé didn’t stop us in our tracks. But over the years, I have found myself in rooms with a lot of guys just like him. When I worked at the Arbutus Club, this 26-year-old Belgian kid, Patrick Marchal, walked in wanting the chef’s job we were advertising. His résumé was thin, but his heart was the size of a mountain.

  “Give me the job for six months,” he said to me. “You don’t even have to pay me. And if at any point I’m not working out you can kick me out the door.”

  Well, he knew I was going to pay him. But I gave him a chance and he worked out brilliantly. He now owns his own winery in France.

  There was a bit of that guy in Leo. He was just looking for a chance. We gave it to him, and he turned out to be a stunner who managed to steal the hearts of just about everyone whose path he crossed. He really was a complete genius who saw beauty in the most nondescript things. Everything he touched seemed to win rave reviews. The IOC had to sign off on every design we came up with, whether it was the mascots or the medals. And every time Leo put something in front of them, the box was ticked minutes later.

  When it came time to design the medals, Leo and Ali spent months consulting with athletes and others. He researched medals through the ages. He came up with the idea of making each medal unique, something that had never been done before. “Imagine,” he said one day. “Imagine an athlete showing his medal to a bunch of kids and telling them there isn’t another one like it anywhere in the world.”

  Leo had a bit of child in him, that innocent spirit of wonder. He revelled in the happiness of others. At staff gatherings when we honoured the performance of a teammate, you would always spot Leo standing on the side wearing a huge grin. In meetings, if he was showing us something and it wasn’t working or he wasn’t getting the feedback he was looking for, he’d stop and say, “Okay, we’re not ready. This is not good enough. I’ll come back.” And he would, with something better. But when he felt he was dead right he would pull out all the stops to get you to his point of view.

  Then one August morning, Ali asked to see me and Dave Cobb. She started to talk but couldn’t get the words out before breaking down. Leo had passed away the night before in his sleep. It was his heart. The irony was lost on few of us. The guy had one of the biggest ones around.

  At his memorial service in the packed atrium of our company headquarters a few days later, I asked those assembled to cast their eyes around the very place we were standing and see how much Leo had touched. The look of the Games was everywhere. He was buried on a lovely warm Vancouver day, and as we stood around his grave taking turns tipping soil on top of his coffin a rapid transit train with one of Leo’s Olympic designs on the side whizzed by. We all smiled.

  THANKS TO OUR merchandising and sponsorship deals, by the fall of 2008, the financial he
alth of our organization was fairly strong. Our construction woes were behind us. We were optimistic about the revenue we would get from ticketing. Every week or two we seemed to be announcing another deal, tacking a new name up on our wall. One week it was beds, another hand sanitizers or chewing gum. Companies everywhere wanted in. The project was humming along, mostly controversy free. Media camping out on our lawn to catch us mucking up were getting frustrated.

  Then, on September 15, 2008, New York–based investment house Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Over the next few days, coverage of the collapse was like watching the outbreak of a war. It was wall-to-wall mayhem. People were scared. The headlines in the newspapers were gigantic. The evening news was inevitably filled with images of stock traders burying their faces in their hands. No one was sure where this was all heading, but it didn’t look good.

  At first it was unclear how Canada might be affected. But it wasn’t long before the downfall of Lehman’s triggered big problems at other institutions. It became evident that other U.S. investment houses were in trouble, and banks too, mostly because of subprime mortgages. Foreclosure signs began popping up from Pensacola, Florida, to Salinas, California. The daily reports of the widespread damage to the U.S. economy became numbing after a while.

  While the carnage certainly caught the attention of those of us at VANOC, there was little evidence that the problems down south were seeping into our backyard. Payments from our corporate partners were being made on time. No one was calling to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with us. No one was even phoning to sound the alarm, put us on notice. The levee was holding. A false confidence set in that the financial panic in the U.S. might miss Canada entirely. But there was a growing unease in our boardroom.