raditional and soft type of Olympic advertising will not succeed at the 2008 games in Beijing. Advertising messages from sponsors including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Visa and Samsung depicting the Olympics as a coming together of world athletes and celebration of humankind will fail to sell products in the host nation because the Chinese are much more interested in winning, said Tom Doctoroff, the chief executive of advertising agency JWT, Greater China and area director of north-east Asia.

There is a lot at stake for the 11 multinational companies who paid the International Olympic Committee a total of 480 million pounds to become official worldwide partners of the games from 2005 to 2008.... more