Zika virus causes Rio worries to spread

Corporate planning for the Rio Olympics has become significantly more problematic as the mysterious Zika virus hammers Brazil.

The health crisis has emerged just as sponsors and hospitality providers fine-tune their plans for Rio, presenting a late-breaking X factor for companies that use the Olympics as a prime business development platform.

“We absolutely see this as another huge threat,” said Jan Katzoff, head of global sports and entertainment consulting for GMR Marketing, whose Rio clients include Visa, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Omega and others. “It’s a concern on top of other concerns we have operationally in Brazil.”

In speaking with several Olympic partners and veteran consultants, a sense is emerging that Zika might accomplish what reports of water pollution, delayed construction, economic collapse and security issues haven’t: dampen the extraordinary American enthusiasm for witnessing the first South American Games firsthand.

A worker sprays for mosquitoes that transmit the Zika virus. Photo by: AP IMAGES

Weinberg, like the International Olympic Committee and Rio 2016 organizers, hopes that the mosquito-borne illness will subside as Rio’s summer turns to winter. In the meantime, the first priority is the message to clients’ own employees.

“We’re working first and foremost on internal communications, so that they have practices and processes in place so they can help everyone who needs to know where it stands right now,” Weinberg said.

That follows the lead of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which distributed a memo Feb. 10 informing athletes and sport governing bodies what it knows about the disease, and explaining how Olympic officials are trying to combat it. That hasn’t kept some athletes, such as U.S. women’s soccer goalie Hope Solo, from raising the prospect of skipping Rio. The disease may be linked to a surge in severe birth defects, making women of child-bearing years a special risk group.

UEG is talking to its own employees, too, Weinberg said, with the goal of supplanting hearsay or rumor with facts as scary headlines keep coming.

“We’ve not made any decisions in terms of our teams, but again, we’re keeping a very close eye on making sure we have the right information, and we’re not just working off anecdotes,” Weinberg said. Attending Rio will be a personal decision for employees, she added.

It’s still early. Sponsors are putting out save-the-date style invites to VIP guests now, and those guest lists don’t typically get nailed down until 90 to 120 days out from the opening ceremony, or in this case April, Katzoff said. Marketing activations and communications strategies will develop on a similar time frame, Weinberg said.

“Hopefully in the next 30 to 45 days we’ll have additional information and see if it gets better or worse,” Katzoff said.

The Zika virus, which health experts say triggers symptoms in 20 percent of infected people, is only the latest problem to plague Brazil, already under harsh scrutiny for failing to clean up polluted waterways and lagging on transportation and Games venue construction.

Ticket sales have lagged domestically in Brazil, but until Zika emerged, American interest appeared robust, industry insiders said. It still could recover, but some sources said they’ve heard from guests who are putting long-standing plans on hold until more is known.

A potential Olympics fan might be able to credibly argue that water pollution or a severe recession wouldn’t hinder a weeklong sports vacation, but Zika poses a potentially grave, still unknown, health risk to anyone near a mosquito.

The uncertainty about the virus is a big curveball for marketing and hospitality planners, Katzoff said.

“We’ve seen lots of Olympics that have been chaotic to this point, and we’ve always found a way to deliver a great experience for people,” he said. “We can put more staff at a venue. We can put more staff on transportation infrastructure. We can put better communications in place. We can double-check ticketing programs. This is a threat that we don’t have any control over.”

Foreign ticket sellers declined to discuss Zika’s effect on sales. Cartan Tours, a Los Angeles-based company that acts as the authorized reseller of tickets in much of Latin America, expressed confidence in the Rio committee’s handling of health and safety matters but declined to answer other questions. An email to JetSet Sports, a USOC sponsor and authorized American reseller, went unanswered. In late January, The Associated Press reported that only about half the tickets available in Brazil had been sold.

Worst-case scenario for planners is if large numbers of corporate guests stay home, or if fear is so pervasive marketers pare back their activations at the last minute. That happened to a certain extent in Sochi in 2014, due to the distance and threat of terrorism, and in Salt Lake City in 2002, only months after 9/11.

“I don’t think people were ever more freaked out about attending an event than they were in 2002,” Katzoff said. “That was much worse in terms of what we dealt with than what’s going on right now.”