After getting onto this topic before, some of my friends told me to calm down. Brace yourself for an opinion.
I was amused this morning to hear that they had pulled the promotional video that goes alongside the campaign due to reports of induced epileptic shock . I made a similar comment yesterday, the difference was that I joking at the time.
Admittedly good, strong brand design is hard, and sometimes you need to be downright adventurous. A really rule-breaking design thrown in amongst the other designs can be used as leverage with your client to get them to accept something slightly more bold than their conservative attitude might normally allow. However it has dangerous consequences, especially when either the client says they really like the wild one, or when the branding agency gets to absorbed by their own ‘genius’.
I think this is probably a case of the latter.
Eighties rave culture has seen somewhat of a renaissance in the past few months, but this is nowhere near long enough to establish that the trend will continue for much longer (especially five years until the games eventually starts). Also, whereas in youth culture acceptance of something radical is possible, universal sporting events are not a place to flex over-zealous creative muscle.
By their very nature, sports are stalwarts of conservatism and not prone to spontaneous alteration (e.g. rules, the rare admission of new sports, the subtlety in the number of milliseconds between newly broken world records). The Olympic brand needs provide a universal appeal, worldwide, and although attempting to be daring, this one desperately misses the point.
I’m not adverse to seeing something truly innovative, but unfortunately this brand may leave a bitter aftertaste for years to come, a reminder of public spending wastage. White elephants are a speciality of recent UK government; the Olympics has already run three times over budget (VAT, doh!). With £400,000 being spent on a re-brand (a large chunk of which will have been spent on market research) it only goes to show how self-absorbed (and plain wrong) a consultancy can be; a good example of how nobody involved seems to be a good judge of value for money. This is not just my opinion – I’m referring to the hundreds of thousands of complaints and overwhelming public opinion that the design is “a bit crap”.
Although I think popularity around this will grow in the short term, (or indifference will culture) this was a bad decision, too risky, and possibly heading to be the appropriately lasting icon of a publicly-funded financial sieve.
There is a difference between being clever and being abusive with design principles, and the only other rebrands I can remember that garnered such a negative public riposte were when Coca-Cola changed it’s name and when Post Office became Consignia (and guess who was responsible for that). Both lasted five minutes. Interesting to see if this one sticks (it will, at least for a while).
It makes designers look like we don’t know what we’re doing.
Update: I’ve just discovered Wolff Olins (the London 2012 Olympics brand agency) were also responsible for the very short-lived Abbey National rebrand four years ago (you probably won’t even remember it – see above).