Track & Field, Coupons Help Olympic Green See Busiest Day So Far
By Tripp Mickle, Staff Writer, SportsBusiness Journal
The combination today of blue skies, the opening of the Bird’s Nest for track & field and coupons providing access to the Olympic Green triggered one of the busiest days the area has seen to date. Sponsors, some of whom had complained about light foot traffic at the massive pavilions showcasing their brands, saw a significant increase in visitors. They credited the factors above and the word-of-mouth buzz generated by their pavilions over the course of a week. “Track & field started today, which had something to do with it, but really there was just a different vibe today,” said IOC TOP sponsor Johnson & Johnson VP/Corporate Equity and Olympic Sponsorship Owen Rankin. “It felt great.” TOP sponsor Coca-Cola Senior Manager of Public Affairs & Communications Petro Kacur agreed, saying, “When you’ve got athletics, Water Cube and gymnastics events on the same day, you’ve got more people on the green and more people coming through. We’re happy.”
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| Crowds Line Up For Coca-Cola Experience |
LINES FORM OUTSIDE DISPLAYS: At 2:00pm, the Coca-Cola Experience -- a 42,000-square-foot building showcasing Coke -- had a line of more than 300 people waiting to get into its facility. It was admitting groups of 110 people every 5-10 minutes, which would give it a total crowd of more 7,000 people by closing time at 7:00pm. Omega was similarly busy. The brand has the closest pavilion to the Bird’s Nest, which has made it a first stop among many people on the Green. At 1:00pm, shortly before a Cindy Crawford appearance, 200-300 visitors milled around the brand’s floor looking at an exhibit on watch making. Omega has been pleased with its traffic most days, said company exec Natacha Garder. Further down the Green from the stadium, the crowds thinned out some. Johnson & Johnson, which is exhibiting authentic terracotta warriors, had close to 100 people waiting in line to enter its pavilion, a huge jump from the empty lines on Sunday. “We had lines all day,” Rankin said. “There were more people around. There was a lot of energy. The weather was great. Today was just a great day.”
ACTION COMES FROM TALKS: IOC Marketing Commission Chair Gerhard Heiberg said Sunday that several sponsors complained to the organization about BOCOG restricting access to the Olympic Green. He met with BOCOG officials the next day to talk to them about their decision to limit access to the Olympic Green to ticket holders during the first days of the event. Following the meeting, BOCOG began allowing people with accreditations on the Green even if they didn’t have an Olympic Common Domain (OCD) sticker on their accredidation. It also began distributing coupons to Beijing citizens that provide access to the Green. Those efforts and the addition of people with tickets to track & field events helped increase the crowds on the Olympic Green today. While the Green was not overwhelmed with crowds in the same way that Tiananmen Square is on a daily basis, it was significantly more full than it had been all week. “We’re seeing day-by-day, word-of-mouth increases,’” Kacur said. “It’s meeting our expectations now after the first couple of days it gets passed around and people say, ‘You’ve got to see the Coca-Cola Experience.’”
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