'Big' didn't happen
OLYMPIC FLOP | For failing to sell the IOC on Chicago, bid team gets the blame
Typical Chicago. It took just minutes for the second-guessing and finger-pointing to begin after the Windy City was quickly ousted Friday from the competition to host the 2016 Olympic Games. And given the magnitude of the Olympic bid project, it was easy to find excuses. Bloc voting. Anti-American sentiment. The United States Olympic Committee. And so on.
But let's be clear about one thing, even as the blame game is sure to go on for weeks and months to come. Only one entity is finally responsible for Chicago's defeat: the Chicago 2016 committee. It was their mission -- and their responsibility -- to deliver a victory for Chicago. And they didn't. Period.
(AP)
Let's be clear about one other thing. Though it was masked by a lot of talk about Olympic venues and financial projections and such, Chicago 2016's primary task was a marketing job -- selling the more than 100 members of the International Olympic Committee on holding the Summer Olympics in Chicago, a city about which most IOC members knew little or nothing. A big job, to be sure. But it shouldn't have been impossible, given the resources the committee could have brought to the job at hand. But as Friday's devastating vote proved, Chicago 2016 failed miserably.
Though there were plenty of so-called professionals with prior experience pitching Olympic bids on the Chicago team, the reality is two people, Major Daley and Chicago 2016 Chairman Patrick Ryan (along with their respective inner circles), were calling the shots. And as is now evident, Daley and Ryan were involved in a project of global proportions that they simply were ill-equipped to orchestrate.
We kept hoping that at some point before Friday's fateful final pitch, the 2016 Committee would opt for a really big gesture as part of their last presentation to the IOC. Something like a Chicago Olympic anthem that the city could own and use to separate itself from the competition. Apparently, there was some talk about going big. But also lots of conflicting opinions within Chicago 2016, we're told, about how best to proceed. Ultimately, "big" didn't happen.
Instead, the Ogilvy/Chicago ad agency was dispatched -- at practically the last minute -- to do the central video for the pitch. The film featured lots of sweet kids, but no compelling story line or great music. It felt small. Forgettable. And it was still being tweaked at the very last minute, we hear, because the Chicago 2016 crowd realized the piece didn't fully work. But then again, things rarely do work when they are feverishly pulled together on a tight budget at the last minute.
The only grand gesture the Chicago 2016 Committee truly counted on to lead them to victory was President Obama. They were wrong, of course, to think Obama was a sure bet. And doubly so, after it became apparent Friday that Obama was terribly off his game and incapable of persuading the IOC to go with Chicago.
Marketing is many things. But the greatest and most successful of all marketing efforts always include a strong and memorable emotional component. That all-important component was -- with the notable exception of Michelle Obama's remarkably passionate speech -- totally absent from Chicago's rigidly rendered final Olympic pitch. Too bad. But we blame no one for that -- and for Chicago's loss -- but the Chicago 2016 bid committee.