KEY POINTS:
Liu Xiang, the 110m hurdles world record holder and Athens gold medallist, is the face of the Beijing Olympics in his home country. The sportfest is 215 days away, and for Xiang, his country's first track Olympic champion, commercial life could hardly be better.
The 24-year-old can be seen racing animals in Visa commercials, popping Nutrilite dietary supplements with 100m world record holder Asafa Powell, of Jamaica, and advertising Nike trainers. Xiang is also a spokesman for Coca-Cola, one of the elite Olympic sponsors.
Go anywhere in China and billboard ads from the likes of Samsung, Omega and Johnson & Johnson all feature the most famous hoops in the world.
Excitement at what will be China's coming-out party on the world stage is mounting. The stakes are high as the business world ensures that Beijing will be the most lucrative games ever.
In sports marketing, it is usually for the football World Cup that multinationals sign cheques worth tens of millions, but this time, the Olympics have eclipsed it.
Dan Parr, a sports marketing expert at Brand Rapport, based in Hong Kong, said: "The biggest brands see this as an unparalleled opportunity to get access to one of the world's biggest marketplaces. The elite sponsors such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's see this as an opportunity to really drive home an advantage by being in the Olympics."
Elite sponsors who pay more than £100 million ($256 million) in deals structured over two or three Olympiads signed up years ago to ensure they were part of the Chinese games.
They get the right to use the Olympic logo both in China and overseas for marketing purposes. A survey by Ipsos Mori showed that sponsors generate major sales uplifts compared with rivals in the year of an Olympics.
The fact that North American television advertising rates rival sought-after events such as the Oscars and the Superbowl, but over a far longer period, appears to back this up.
The next tier down are local sponsors, and in Beijing they fall into two categories - international businesses that want to establish a better foothold in the country, such as VW or Adidas, and Chinese firms such as Sinopec, China Mobile and Bank of China.
Despite the fact that local sponsors only get to use the logo in China, they still believe the games will act as a global showcase.
Sponsorship deals usually only allow one slot per sector, which is why McDonald's is the only fast-food sponsor. But Beijing has broken this protocol by allowing three beer sponsors, Budweiser, Tsingtao and Yanjing.
The reason, according to the Beijing organisers, who have had praise heaped on them for maximising sponsorship revenue streams, is that the country is much too populous for one sponsor to monopolise.
Another benefit is allowing sponsors to illustrate their social or environmental credentials.
Six months ago, global conservation organisation WWF and Coca-Cola announced collaboration on a new worldwide initiative to conserve water resources and replace the water used to produce its drinks in China.
The move is seen as a way of addressing criticism the beverage giant has faced in India, where communities near some of its bottling plants complain that Coca-Cola depletes and pollutes their water.
Some tie-ups, though, have attracted concern. Several US firms, such as Honeywell, GE and IBM, have helped the authoritarian Chinese government to design and install high-tech surveillance systems ahead of the games and the World Expo in Shanghai two years later.
With Beijing set to be the most lucrative commercial games ever, attention is now focusing on 2012 and London, which needs to raise roughly £650 million in sponsorship. It has so far signed up LloydsTSB, EDF and Adidas, with Deloitte's as a second-tier sponsor, in deals totalling £230 million.
Some senior sports sponsorship insiders believe that London is struggling to attract the same interest as Beijing, but organisers reject this.
"There is absolutely no question that either the domestic or international sponsorship programmes for London 2012 are going slowly or are in any way behind schedule," said a spokeswoman for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games.
The Olympics is meant to be the event in which commercial interests are banished. There is no perimeter advertising, no banner logos on sports clothing and interviews with athletes are conducted against backdrops where corporate identities are conspicuous by their absence.
Despite this, competition to set business records is as strong as that for the conventional medals tables.
- Observer
